UTUtah Fun Facts

Roughly 80 percent of Utah's residents live along the Wasatch Front, a strip of valley floor about 120 miles long at the base of the mountains. Almost everything else is public land. The federal government owns close to two thirds of the state.

Facts most people get wrong

• The Great Salt Lake is not equally salty everywhere. A railroad causeway built in 1959 cut it in two. The north arm runs several times saltier than the south and turns pink from salt loving microbes, so satellite photos show the lake in two different colors.
• Zion was not named by the pioneers who first protected it. The canyon became Mukuntuweap National Monument in 1909, using the Southern Paiute name. It was renamed Zion in 1918, partly because officials thought the original name would scare off visitors, and became a national park in 1919.
• The Bonneville Salt Flats are not sand. They are a crust of salt left behind by Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric lake that covered around 20,000 square miles of the Great Basin. Cars have raced on the flats since 1914.
• Polygamy is not practiced by the LDS Church. The church ended it with the 1890 Manifesto, and Utah's constitution banned it as a condition of statehood in 1896. Groups that still practice it are separate organizations.
• Salt Lake City is not the most Latter-day Saint part of Utah. The capital is the least religiously homogeneous corner of the state, and the LDS share of the population there is well below the statewide figure.
• Green Jell-O is not a joke about Utah. It is official. The legislature named Jell-O the state snack in 2001 after residents took public offense at losing their per capita consumption lead.

Records and firsts

• Utah has five national parks, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef and Zion, the third most of any state behind California and Alaska.
• The transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, when the golden spike joined the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines.
• Bingham Canyon southwest of Salt Lake City is the deepest open pit mine on Earth, roughly three quarters of a mile deep and two and a half miles across, worked continuously since 1906.
• Rainbow Bridge near Lake Powell is the largest known natural bridge in the world, standing 290 feet high with a span of 275 feet.
• Pando, an aspen grove in Fishlake National Forest, is a single organism sharing one root system across about 106 acres and roughly 47,000 stems.
• Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics and was awarded the 2034 Winter Games in 2024, making it the rare American city to land the Winter Olympics twice.
• Utah has the youngest median age of any state, around 32, and the largest average household size in the country.

Geography that surprises

• Utah is one of the four states meeting at a single point at Four Corners, the only spot in the country where four state lines touch.
• Kings Peak reaches 13,528 feet in the Uinta Mountains, the major range in the lower 48 that runs east to west instead of north to south.
• The Great Salt Lake has no outlet to the sea. Water leaves only by evaporation, so the shoreline moves for miles, and the lake hit its lowest recorded level in 2022.
• Arches National Park has more than 2,000 catalogued stone arches within 120 square miles, the densest concentration anywhere.
• Elevation in Utah swings from around 2,180 feet in the far southwest desert to 13,528 feet in the Uintas, a range of more than 11,000 feet inside one state.

Where the name comes from

Utah comes from the Ute people, by way of the Spanish rendering yuta. The word is usually translated as people of the mountains, though the original meaning is debated and the Ute call themselves Nuche.

It was not the settlers' first choice. Mormon pioneers who arrived in 1847 proposed a state called Deseret, a word from the Book of Mormon meaning honeybee. Congress rejected it and created Utah Territory in 1850. The beehive stayed anyway, which is why the nickname is the Beehive State and the state motto is a single word, Industry.

State basics

Bordering states

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