UTAH

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 Utah the place to come for outdoor pursuits, whether your tastes run to hiking, off-track mountain biking, whitewater rafting or 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 parks like Arches and Canyonlands are every bit as dramatic. Huge tracts of this empty desert, in which beautiful pre-Columbian pictographs and Ancestral Puebloan 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 the resorts around Park City offer some of the best skiing in North America. Led by Brigham Young, Utah's earliest Anglo 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 – had the South not intervened, civil war with the Mormons was a real possibility. 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; In most towns, at least one restaurant will be licensed to sell beer, wine and mixed drinks to diners, and it may also be licensed to sell beer in its bar or lounge. Beer is also sold in a few other locations, but to drink stronger liquor you'll have to become a member of a "private club"; most sell temporary membership for a token fee. Take-out bottled drinks, including beer, can only be purchased in State Liquor Stores.

Northern Utah
Compared to the scenic splendor of the southern half of the state, northern Utah holds little to interest the tourist, although Salt Lake City, the capital, is by far the state's largest and most cosmopolitan urban center. The dramatic Wasatch Mountains that line Salt Lake's eastern horizon do however come into their own in winter, as they constitute one of the nation's premier ski destinations. The northeast corner has coal mines, old railroad towns and, along the Wyoming border, the Uinta Mountains, uncrossed by road and showing hardly a sign of civilization. From the northwest, the harshly alkaline Great Basin plain stretches uneventfully west across Nevada to California.

Northeast Utah
Most of Utah's northeastern corner – due east of Salt Lake City, as Wyoming takes a bite out of its otherwise perfect rectangle – is taken up by the forbidding Uinta Mountains, very much of a piece with the rest of the Rockies. However, to the east of the mountains the terrain reverts to the classic Southwestern desert plains, with the small town of Vernal serving as the base for explorations of the wildernesses of Flaming Gorge and Dinosaur.

Southern Utah:
The national parks Southern Utah is a peculiar combination of the mind-boggling and the mundane. Its scenery is stupendous, a stunning geological freakshow where the earth is ripped bare to expose cliffs and canyons of every imaginable color, unseen rivers gouge mighty furrows into endless desert plateaus, and strange sandstone towers thrust from the sagebrush. By contrast, however, the tiny Mormon towns scattered across this epic landscape are almost without exception boring in the extreme, so most visitors spend as much time as possible outdoors. While Southern Utah's five national parks are complemented by countless lesser-known but equally dramatic wildernesses, they make the most obvious targets for travelers. In the southwest, Zion National Park centers on an awe-inspiring canyon, backed by barren highlands of white sandstone, while Bryce Canyon is a roaring inferno of orange pinnacles. Over to the east, Arches holds an eroded desertscape of graceful red-rock fins and spurs, all on a more manageable scale than the astonishing hundred-mile vistas of neighboring Canyonlands. Both lie within easy reach of Moab, a disheveled former mining town turned Utah's hippest destination. The fifth park, Capitol Reef, stretches through the middle of the state, pierced by slender, ravishing canyons. The defining topographical feature of southwest Utah is the Grand Staircase. Named by pioneer river-runner John Wesley Powell, it consists of a series of plateaus, stacked tier upon tier, that climb from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The Chocolate Cliffs, near the border with Arizona, are followed by the dazzling Vermillion Cliffs, then the White Cliffs – a 2000ft wall of Navajo sandstone, best seen at Zion – the Grey Cliffs, and finally the Pink Cliffs of Bryce. Although it took a billion years of sedimentation for these rocks to form, the staircase itself has only been created in the last dozen million years, by the general upthrust of the Colorado Plateau, which stretches away to the east. This is a tough land, and a rough one for travelers: with fewer roads than anywhere else in the US, almost nobody gets far into the deep backcountry. Even within the national parklands, overground access is more often than not limited to heavy-duty, high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicles, hikers and, increasingly, to mountain bikes. The best way of all to experience the region is as the first explorers did: by water, along such rivers as the Colorado and the Green. Dozens of companies offer river-rafting trips, floating downstream and camping out under the clear night sky to experience the sights, sounds and smells of the desert.

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