More About Salt Lake City
Salt Lake City in Utah is the state capital, and seat of Salt Lake County. Located in the north central part of the state it lays along the western slope of the Wasatch Range. The entire Salt Lake Valley was once part of the basin of ancient Lake Bonneville. It is the largest and most important city in a large region of the interior West and serves as the industrial, financial, religious, and commercial center of Utah. The city is also the international headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known as the Mormon Church.
Downtown Salt Lake City is noted for its broad streets and spacious blocks, a legacy of the Mormon settlers who laid out the city in 1847. The city was built on a grid system based on the four streets bordering Temple Square, the focus of the downtown area. Inside the square is the Mormon Temple, which took 40 years to build. Other important buildings are the Mormon Tabernacle, the State Capitol, the Salt Lake City and County Building, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Madeleine, and the Delta Center auditorium. Several blocks west of Temple Square lay the Utah State Fair Grounds, and the Utah state capitol stands slightly to the north. South of Temple Square is the city's central business district.
Disarmingly pleasant and easygoing, Salt Lake City is well worth a stopover of a couple of days. It's not a particularly thrilling destination in itself, but its setting is superb, towered over by the Wasatch Front, which marks the dividing line between the comparatively lush eastern and the bone-dry western halves of northern Utah, and which offers great hiking or cycling in summer and fall and, in winter, some of the world's best skiing. Salt Lake City's bid to raise its international profile by hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics resulted in a major building program both in the city itself and in the surrounding ski valleys.
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