Grand Canyon National Park is one of the most incredible places on Earth. Imagine gazing upon a vast canyon that’s up to a mile deep and 18 miles wide.
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area is a huge park surrounding Lake Powell. It covers 1,254,429 acres of mostly desert, with roughly ⅔ in Utah and ⅓ in Arizona.
Zion National Park is an oasis in the desert, with spectacular green scenery throughout a deep canyon. It’s located in southern Utah.
Before visiting Cedar Breaks National Monument, we stopped in Cedar City, Utah. This small city is famous for the annual Utah Shakespeare Festival.
The stunning City and Council Building is the home of the city government of Salt Lake City. It was completed in 1894 and replaced the older Council Building, which was later dismantled and moved to Capitol Hill. It served as the state capitol building from Utah’s admission into the Union in 1896 until the new capitol building was finished in 1915. The county offices were also in the building until a separate facility was built in the 1980s.
The Utah State Capitol is the center of government for the state of Utah. It sits on a former munitions storage area once called Arsenal Hill (now Capitol Hill). The land was donated by Salt Lake City to the state in 1888 for the purpose of building the capitol, but construction didn’t begin until 1912. The building was completed in 1916.
The Beehive House was the home and office of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the first governor of Utah. It sits a block east of Temple Square in Salt Lake City.
Temple Square is the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church. There are a lot of beautiful and important buildings open to visitors.
Our stop in Provo ended up being shorter than planned due to lack of time. We skipped the museums but we were able to see the downtown and the major sites.
The old railroad town of Evanston, Wyoming, was supposed to be a quick stopover and our first night in a real bed after a week of camping at Yellowstone and Grand Teton. We ended up sticking around the next morning a bit longer than we had anticipated, enjoying how the town preserves its heritage.