Regions of Utah

Four out of five Utahns live on a bench of an ancient lake, under a mountain wall that rises 7,000 feet in seven miles and beside a salt lake that is still there. That geometry makes the weather: lake-effect bands that dump two feet on Little Cottonwood while downtown gets flurries, a winter inversion that traps the valley's air under a lid of warm air for a week at a time, and canyon winds off the Wasatch that arrive at 80 miles an hour.

Utah County is the fastest-growing large county in the country, and it sits in the same lake-and-wall geometry as Salt Lake with a second lake in front of it. Utah Lake makes its own fog and its own bands, Timpanogos and Nebo stand two miles above the valley, and thirty minutes east the Wasatch Back keeps a snowpack that outlasts the Front by weeks.

St. George is the hottest place in Utah and Brian Head, sixty miles up the road, is the coldest and snowiest — 6,000 feet of elevation between them on one Interstate. That climb is the whole story of southwest Utah: a Mojave corner that runs 115 degrees in July, a set of plateaus above 10,000 feet that hold snow into June, and slot canyons between them that fill with monsoon water from storms nobody in the canyon can see.