USA Guide
The Southwest
Utah
With the biggest, most beautiful, and most pristine landscapes in North America, Utah has something for everyone: from brilliantly coloured canyons, across endless desert plains, to thickly wooded and snow-covered mountains. Almost all of this unmatched range of terrain is public land, making Utah the place to come for outdoor pursuits, whether your tastes run to hiking, mountain biking, whitewater rafting, or skiing.
Southern Utah has more national parks than anywhere else in the US; it has often been suggested that the entire area should become one vast national park. The most accessible parts – such as Zion and Bryce Canyon – are by far the most visited, but lesser-known parks like Arches and Canyonlands are every bit as dramatic. Huge tracts of this empty desert, in which fascinating pre-Columbian pictographs and Ancestral Puebloan ruins lie hidden, are all but unexplored; seeing them requires self-sufficiency and considerable planning.
Though northwestern Utah is predominantly flat and dry, the granite mountains of the Wasatch Front tower over state capital Salt Lake City – an attractive and enjoyable stopover – while the resorts around Park City offer some of North America's finest skiing.
Led by Brigham Young, Utah's earliest white settlers – the Mormons – arrived in the Salt Lake area in 1847, and set about the massive irrigation projects that made their agrarian way of life possible. Nowadays, seventy percent of Utah's two-million-strong population are Mormons. The Mormon influence is responsible for the layout of Utah's towns, where residential streets are as wide as interstates, and all are numbered block-by-block according to the same logical if ponderous system.
Mormon businessmen became renowned as fiercely pro-mining and anti-conservation. Only since the 1980s has tourism been appreciated as a major industry, and former mining towns such as Moab developed facilities for wide-eyed travellers smitten by the allure of the desert. Increased tourism has also led to a relaxation of Utah's notorious drinking laws. In most towns, at least one restaurant is licensed to sell beer, wine, and mixed drinks to diners, and maybe even to sell beer in its bar or lounge.
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