Holidays in Salt Lake explored

Quick getaway to Salt Lake

Sometimes you simply have to pause. Not a whole two week run away to some remote stretch of shore, a few days somewhere that seems different enough to reset your head without using a spreadsheet to map out. Salt Lake City fits that brief better than most places recognise it for. Hidden amid the Wasatch Mountains and the huge, pale expanse of the Great Salt Lake, the city has a downtown you can actually walk across during a morning, as well as wilderness so close to the edge of town you can hike a canyon trail in the early morning and come back for a late lunch. For a short break, that mix of urban tranquillity and raw nature is hard to beat. You don’t need to be a highly skilled athlete to love it, either. A casual stroll around Liberty Park, or across the paths at Red Butte Garden, can give you the same atmosphere of space, without your boots on – you can walk right through it. Most of the site visitors begin at Temple Square. Even if you are not one to follow the Mormon tradition, the granite temples, the mirror-reflecting pool and the perfectly preserved gardens are really beautiful to visit. Volunteer guides, many of whom are young missionaries from all over the world, provide an unexpectedly international feel to the place. From there, travel north to the Utah State Capitol. The building itself rests atop a hill overlooking from the city grid all the way up to the snow capped peaks, and the interior is far more opulent than you’d expect from a state known for its practical pioneer roots. If you’re looking for local flavour minus the tourist gloss, the Avenues neighbourhood comes through with Victorian porches, independent coffee shops and people who will offer to show you the trail to hike that afternoon. For an excitatory local vibe, 9th and 9th features local bookstores, craft ice cream and a laid-back feel that reads more like Portland than prairie. And if you haven’t completely packed up, making the drive up Big Cottonwood Canyon to Brighton or Solitude, even to walk through the aspens or see the rock faces, reminds you of why these people rarely want to leave. Your stay depends on your budget, and Salt Lake legitimately serves both ends. The Grand America Hotel is the city’s grande dame, all marble floors, courtyard gardens and a kind of hushed luxury that leaves you wishing to sit in the lobby with a novel you pose as reading. Hotel Monaco offers boutique personality right downtown — bold colours, a more playful take on elevated. But if you are budget-conscious, the city has clean friendly budget motels all the way along State Street and near the airport, in addition to a surprisingly cheap Airbnb market. Neighbourhoods such as Sugar House have entire guest apartments for the price of a small hotel room in a larger city, and the mid-range chains here tend to punch above their weight, staffed by people who have been a bit more than happy about you visiting than grateful to be in town. What impressed me about Salt Lake was its layered culture. The LDS effect is tangible, from the extensive genealogy archives to the Sunday silence that descends on parts of the city. But that isn’t the end of the story. The west side teems with Latino culture in family-owned bakeries and colourful quinceañera shops. There is a massive Pacific Islander community, and over the decades, refugee resettlement brought Ethiopian, Sudanese, and Burmese communities that have opened restaurants and stores that most tourists wouldn’t find. Much of its history has much more richness than the conventional pioneer narrative. Yes, Brigham Young took the Mormon faithful here and called it home. Yes, the golden spike linked a nation nearby. But it is also a city of miners, railroad workers and activists who chafed against the grain, a place that’s spent almost two centuries learning to pay tribute to its origins, and make room for new stories. The food reflects that complexity. You can still be found the comfort classics, the funeral potatoes and fry sauce that speak to a culture based on community potlucks and feeding a crowd cheaply. But eat, also, wonderfully well at farm-to-table places such as Pago, eat good Mexican food on the west side or discover Vietnamese, Thai and East African flavours that will fit in any major coastal city. The coffee scene has exploded in the last decade, and local roasters take their practice very seriously. Even the beer culture, previously unimaginable in a state with such storied teetotaler history, now churns out award-winning brews that locals talk about with the same reverence normally associated with ski conditions. I discovered my peaceful moment on a bench by the stream at City Creek Centre, which seems strange because it is basically an outdoor mall. But the water is real, diverted from the actual creek, and the trees rustle overhead while the mountains are seen at the end of the street. I watched office workers on lunch breaks, tourists working on maps and teenagers laughing at the noise as they moved past me. The city continued moving about me, that soft urban hum of feet beating, conversation, distant traffic. I sat there with my coffee getting cold in my hands, and the noise in my own head almost stopped, for maybe ten minutes. I didn't need to be anywhere else. That is the real gift of taking only a short vacation in Salt Lake. It doesn't require a vacation of the highest speed. It allows you to move at the speed of a human, whether that be an early morning hike up Millcreek Canyon or a leisurely breakfast, while the city wakes in the mornings. A few days here aren’t going to change your life, but they may help remind you how to breathe again. And sometimes that is precisely sufficient.