Salt Lake is not New York. Why the heck would it want to be? It’s frickin’ perfect here.

Utah’s capital has spent most of two centuries watching the rest of the country’s big cities grow up. It’s been learning, editing, building. Salt Lake City is laid back like Seattle but it’s sunny here five days a week. It’s folksy like Boston without a weird accent. (Well…) It’s got theaters, theatres and restaurants like New York but rent for a Brooklyn studio will get you 3,000 square feet here. It’s got mountains like… where? Geneva? but without all the equivocating. Four pro sports teams, four ski resorts, three freeways and twelve apostles. Everything you need; nothing you don’t. 

The Great Outdoors

Luckily outdoorists tend to be a fairly peaceable lot or there would be some serious turf wars among various local factions. Salt Lake City, Utah, sits in a mountain bowl 4,300 feet up, with immediate access to all forms of adventure: four world-class ski resorts 45 minutes from Salt Lake International Airport (with 10 more outside city limits); a lineup of slanty canyons to the east with a hundred options for hiking, biking, climbing and camping; a Great Salty Lake to the west for boating and floating; and there’s golf, too, for you golfers.

Indoor Salt Lake

And there are plenty of indoor things to do in Salt Lake City, too: concert venues for crowds of 20 to 20,000; restaurants repping all corners of the globe and a bourgeoning foodie scene at small-market prices; blockbuster theaters and art house indies; ballet, opera, orchestra and theatre worthy of much less convenient metropolises; museums; malls; and pro basketball, soccer, baseball and hockey. And don’t forget the one and only Temple Square, the gothic-and-granite HQ of Mormon-dom. There’s even a happening nightlife (“even” because some people expect a night out in Utah to be as dry as the air).