Salt Lake City

Top things to do in Salt Lake City

1. 01

   Temple Square - the block the entire city is measured from

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   The walled ten-acre block at the centre of the grid, and the reason the grid exists: every address in the valley counts its distance from this corner. The granite temple, quarried out of the canyon south-east of town and forty years in the building, is closed to anyone outside the faith, but the grounds, the gardens and the domed assembly hall beside it are open to all, and the choir that made the church famous rehearses and broadcasts there weekly for free. Missionaries offer tours and will offer their beliefs with them, politely and declinably. A long seismic retrofit has closed large parts of the block for years at a time, so check what is actually open before you plan a morning around it.

2. 02

   Little Cottonwood Canyon - Alta, Snowbird and the light dry snow

   snow adventure climbing 👍 Popular

   A straight glacial trench of pale granite walls that climbs from the valley floor to two ski areas in about forty minutes from downtown. Alta is one of a handful of resorts left in the country that still refuses snowboards and averages well over ten metres of snow a season; Snowbird next door runs an aerial tram to a summit above 3,300 m and the two connect by lift. In winter the road runs under avalanche control, and when the guns are firing everyone inside the canyon is legally required to stay indoors until it lifts. The same walls hold some of the best long granite climbing in the country once the snow goes, and the church keeps its master records in a vault dug into the rock partway up.

3. 03

   The Great Salt Lake - the shrinking inland sea to the west

   nature wildlife scenic 👍 Popular

   What is left of an ice-age lake the size of Lake Michigan: shallow, saltier than the ocean by several times, with no outlet and no fish, only brine shrimp and the flies that feed on them. A railway causeway splits it into two arms with different chemistries, and the northern half turns a startling pink from the microbes that survive there. You float rather than swim, and the shore smells of what dies at the water's edge. Levels fell to their lowest ever recorded in the early 2020s, leaving a wide, cracked, dusty lakebed and a live argument about the valley's water; the marina and the domed dance hall on the southern shore are the easiest access, and the island park north of the city is the good one.

4. 04

   Natural History Museum of Utah - Utah's dinosaurs behind a copper skin

   culture arts nature wildlife history ⭐ Highly recommended

   A building that steps up the foothills in terraces, clad in copper from the open-pit mine across the valley so it weathers into the rock behind it. The draw is the dinosaur hall, which is exceptional even by American standards because the state's Jurassic and Cretaceous beds are among the richest anywhere and many of the animals on display were named from them: a whole wall of horned skulls, most of them dug a few hours south. Galleries on the lake, the desert and the region's first peoples fill out the rest, and the top-floor window frames the valley and the range in one go.

5. 05

   Bonneville Shoreline Trail - walk the beach of a vanished lake

   hiking scenic adventure ⭐ Highly recommended

   A dirt path that runs along the bench above the city at the exact level where an ice-age lake, over three hundred metres deep, once lapped against the mountains before it burst through a pass in Idaho and drained in a matter of weeks. The terrace it cut is now the city's best walking and running route, reachable in minutes from the university, the Capitol or any of the canyon mouths, and it faces west so it collects sunsets over the valley and the salt flats. It sits low enough to stay largely snow-free through winter, which makes it the answer on grey inversion days when the valley air is bad and the bench is above it.

6. 06

   Big Cottonwood Canyon - Brighton and Solitude, and the summer trails

   snow hiking adventure

   The wider, greener canyon of the two, with a set of tight S-curves near the bottom and two ski areas at the top: Solitude, quiet and well named, and Brighton, the locals' hill that runs lifts after dark and lets you skin uphill. In summer this is where the city walks. Donut Falls is a short scramble to water pouring through a hole in the rock, Lake Blanche is a hard, steep climb to a cirque under a sundial-shaped peak, and the road over the pass at the head of the canyon drops down the far side into the mining town on the other side of the range.

7. 07

   Utah State Capitol - a copper dome over the valley

   history scenic

   A neoclassical statehouse on the bench above the city, set so that the main street runs dead at it, with marble halls, a Depression-era mural cycle and a beehive motif repeated on almost every surface, which is the state emblem and stands for industry. Anyone can walk in during the week and the grounds are the best free viewpoint in the centre, looking straight down the numbered streets to the lake. The whole building was jacked onto base isolators in the 2000s so it can ride out an earthquake on the fault that runs along the mountain front.

8. 08

   Family History Library - the world's largest genealogy collection

   history culture arts

   The church's tracing of ancestors is a doctrinal duty, so it has spent a century gathering parish registers, censuses and civil records from more than a hundred countries. The result is a public library beside Temple Square where anyone, of any faith or none, can walk in, be handed to a volunteer and start pulling a family tree apart for as long as the doors are open. Bring names and dates for a grandparent and expect to lose an afternoon. The original microfilm masters live in the vault up the canyon.

9. 09

   Gilgal Sculpture Garden - the sphinx with Joseph Smith's face

   culture arts off beaten path

   A masonry contractor and lay bishop spent the last twenty years of his life building a private garden of stone in his back lot, hidden behind houses on a residential block and reached down an alley most locals still walk past. Twelve sculptures and dozens of carved scripture stones fill it, the best known being a sphinx wearing the face of the church's founder. It is small, free, open in daylight and genuinely strange, and the city now runs it as a park. Fifteen minutes, and the oddest fifteen in Salt Lake City.

10. 10

    Ensign Peak - the hike the founders made to size up the valley

    hiking history scenic

    A short, steep, dusty climb from a small trailhead above the Capitol to a knob where Brigham Young and a handful of others stood days after arriving in 1847 to work out where the city would go. It takes about twenty minutes up, and it gives you the whole thing at once: the grid running away in numbered rows, the lake beyond it, the range at your back and, at the right hour, the sun going down into the salt. Little shade and no water, so go early or late.

11. 11

    Liberty Park and Tracy Aviary - the big green square and its birds

    nature wildlife culture arts

    The city's central park, a whole superblock of old trees, a pond and paths, with one of the oldest freestanding bird collections in the country inside it: condors, eagles, macaws and a good showing of the shorebirds that stop on the salt lake in their millions on the way through. A small museum of Utah folk art in a pioneer-era house on the park's edge is free and better than it sounds. On summer evenings the whole neighbourhood is out here.

12. 12

    Red Butte Garden - dry-country planting on the foothills

    nature wildlife scenic

    The state arboretum, laid out on the slope above the university where the valley turns into mountain, with a serious water-wise and native collection, a herb garden, a fragrance garden built for the blind and a children's garden that lets small people wreck things on purpose. It reads as an argument for what actually grows in a desert basin rather than a display of imported lawns. A concert series runs on the lawn through the warm months, and the trails behind it join the bench path.

13. 13

    This Is The Place Heritage Park - where the wagons came out of the canyon

    history culture arts

    At the mouth of the canyon the pioneer companies descended, a stone monument marks the spot where the first party looked out and, in the telling, was told to drive on because this was the right place. Behind it a village of relocated and rebuilt nineteenth-century houses, shops and a schoolhouse is worked by costumed staff who will show you how the trades were done. It is aimed squarely at families and school groups, and it is the clearest picture you will get of what the valley looked like before the grid.

14. 14

    Utah Olympic Oval - skate on the fastest ice in the world

    adventure culture arts

    The speed-skating hall out in the south-western suburbs, built for the 2002 Games, where thin dry air at over 1,400 m helps skaters go faster than at sea level; a large share of the world records set that winter were set on this sheet, and the claim on the wall has stuck. It stays open to the public for ordinary skating sessions and short-track classes on the same ice, which is an unusually cheap way to stand somewhere a lot of records were broken.

15. 15

    Pastrami burgers, fry sauce and dirty soda - the local eating

    food

    Utah's contributions to American food are specific and unpretentious. Fry sauce, a ketchup and mayonnaise blend invented here, arrives with chips whether you ask or not. The pastrami burger, sliced hot pastrami piled onto a cheeseburger, came out of the Greek-American drive-ins on the valley's main roads and is done properly at the Crown Burgers shops. Funeral potatoes, a cheese and hash-brown bake, turn up at any gathering. And a culture of flavoured-syrup soda counters grew out of a state where much of the population does not drink coffee or alcohol, and now has drive-through queues of its own.

Getting to & around Salt Lake City

Know before you go