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With
the biggest, most beautiful and most
pristine landscapes in North America,
UTAH has something for everyone: from
brilliantly colored canyons, across
endless desert plains, to thickly wooded
and snow-covered mountains. This unmatched
range of terrain, almost all of which is
public land, makes it the place to
come for outdoor pursuits – from
hiking to off-track mountain biking,
whitewater rafting and skiing.
Southern Utah
has more national parks than
anywhere else in the US; in fact 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 areas like
Arches and Canyonlands are
every bit as dramatic. Huge tracts of this
empty desert, in which beautiful
pre-Columbian pictographs and Anasazi
ruins lie hidden, are all but unexplored;
seeing them in safety requires a good
degree of advance planning and
self-sufficiency.
In the
northeast of the state, the
Uinta Mountains remain uncrossed by
road and form one of the most extensive
wilderness areas in the US outside Alaska,
while Flaming Gorge and Dinosaur
preserve more desert splendor. Though the
northwest is predominantly flat and
dry, the granite mountains of the
Wasatch Front tower over state capital
Salt Lake City – a surprisingly
attractive and enjoyable stopover – while
Alta, Snowbird and Park City offer some of
the best skiing in North America.
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. At
first they provoked great suspicion and
hostility back east; Congress turned down
their first petition for statehood in
1850, in part because of the religious
significance of the proposed name,
Deseret, a Mormon word meaning
“honeybee” (the state symbol is still a
beehive, to denote industry). The
Republican convention of 1856 railed
against slavery and polygamy in equal
measure – the potential was there for a
civil war with the Mormons, had the South
not intervened. Relations eased when the
Mormon church realized in 1890 that it had
better drop polygamy on its own terms
before being forced to do so. Statehood
followed in 1896, and a century on,
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.
Despite
Brigham Young’s early opposition to the
search for mineral wealth, Mormon
businessmen became renowned as fiercely
pro-mining and anti-conservation. Only
since the early 1980s – once the uranium
bonanza was definitely over – has tourism
been appreciated as a major industry, and
former mining towns such as Moab
developed facilities for wide-eyed
travelers smitten by the lure of the
desert. Increased tourism has also led to
a relaxation of Utah’s notoriously arcane
drinking laws; patrons of licensed
restaurants can now purchase beer, wine
and mixed drinks.
Click here to go to Utah State
web site. |
