Utah Valley
The valley between Utah Lake and Mount Timpanogos — Provo's canyons and waterfalls, Sundance, Timpanogos Cave, and the family attractions of Lehi.
South of Salt Lake, the freeway spills into Utah Valley — a fast-growing basin of cities along the shore of Utah Lake, anchored by Provo and its university, hemmed in by the sheer eastern wall of Mount Timpanogos. It is younger and busier than it looks, a tech corridor now nicknamed Silicon Slopes, but its best places are the canyons that climb out of it into the mountains.
The valley's signature peak, Timpanogos, hides a treasure inside: Timpanogos Cave National Monument, three linked caverns of delicate, colorful formations reached by a steep mile-and-a-half trail up the wall of American Fork Canyon. To the south, Provo Canyon carries the highway past Bridal Veil Falls, a 600-foot double cascade that drops straight to the roadside, and on up the mountain to Sundance Mountain Resort — the ski hill and arts retreat the actor Robert Redford founded in the late 1960s, whose institute went on to create the Sundance Film Festival.
At the valley's north end, the town of Lehi mixes old and new: the sprawling gardens, dinosaur halls, and family museums of Thanksgiving Point sit a few minutes from the Lehi Roller Mills, a working 1906 flour mill best known to the world as a backdrop in Footloose. And up Spanish Fork Canyon lies a quieter kind of landmark — the Thistle Landslide, where in 1983 a slow-moving mountain buried the town of Thistle, dammed the river, and became one of the costliest slides in American history. The drowned remains are still visible from the highway.
Come for the canyons and the waterfall; stay for the strange mix of a college town, a film legacy, and a mountain that gave way.
What to See in Utah Valley
10 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Natural Areas
Hikes & Trails
Historic Sites
Attractions
Scenic Drives through Utah Valley
Alpine Loop Scenic Byway
Twenty hairpin miles over the shoulder of Mount Timpanogos — UT-92 from American Fork Canyon into Provo Canyon, past Timpanogos Cave, Cascade Springs, and Sundance. Paved and narrow, closed in winter, unbeatable in fall.
Nebo Loop Scenic Byway
Thirty-eight winding miles over the back of Mount Nebo, the highest peak in the Wasatch — a CCC-built byway from Payson to Nephi, past alpine lakes, a 9,300-foot overlook, and a pocket of red-rock hoodoos. Closed in winter, unforgettable in fall.
Stories from Utah Valley
The Invented Legend of Mount Timpanogos
The sleeping princess everyone in Utah Valley knows was written by a track coach in 1922 — and the real story underneath is harder.
The Fault Under Everything
Most of Utah lives on the Wasatch Front because one crack in the crust raised the mountains, dropped the valleys, cut the benches the cities are terraced onto, and warms the springs — and the same crack is the largest earthquake hazard in the interior West, quiet now for a very long time.
Where One Tree Ends
Every gold aspen hillside in Utah is a handful of giant, ancient, single organisms — and the patchwork of autumn color is a map of where one stops and the next begins. They are also quietly disappearing.
The Small Print at the Side of the Road
Utah's historical markers carry two stories: the one on the front, and the one at the bottom — a hundred and twenty-five years of daughters, sons, counties, towns, and one museum deciding what deserved bronze.
The Roads the Depression Built
How three million out-of-work young men built the mountain roads Utah still drives on.
Utah Valley rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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