Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City was deliberately founded in 1847 by Mormon pioneers led by Brigham Young, who looked out over the dry valley below the Wasatch Range and reportedly declared it the place. They laid out an exceptionally wide grid radiating from a central temple and built an irrigated city in the desert at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, a salty remnant of a vast Ice Age lake. It became the capital of Utah at statehood in 1896.

The city sits on a series of old lake terraces on the valley floor, with the Wasatch Range rising abruptly to more than 11,000 feet just east of downtown — close enough that several world-class ski resorts lie within an hour. The Great Salt Lake spreads to the northwest, and the dry Great Basin desert stretches beyond. Salt Lake anchors the populous Wasatch Front, the urban heart of the Intermountain West.

• Utah
  The Beehive State, red rock and the Great Salt Lake located in