When I start a trip, I’m usually eager to hit the road and frequently
find places to stop and sightsee on the way. Although I’m not due in Palm Desert until the
16th and could have made the trip in two days, I decided to make a
longer vacation out of it. Conversely, after I’ve been on the road for several
weeks, I’m usually ready to make a beeline for home and do fewer stops and less
sightseeing on the way back. I thought about stopping in Salt Lake City but
have been there before and will be back there for a ski week in January. On the other hand, though, I’ve never been to
the Provo area, so I decided to make it a stop for two nights and a full day.
Provo is home of Brigham Young University, the church’s largest
higher education institution and one of the largest religiously affiliated
schools in the country. That makes the
city a kind of second center of Mormonism after Salt Lake City but with much
less of Salt Lake’s developing cosmopolitanism.
Like Salt Lake City, Provo and its neighboring towns are spectacularly
located right below the Wasatch Mountains which create an impressive wall to
the east.
I used to be quite impressed by the Front Range west of Denver when I
lived there, but the truth is the peaks are more distant from the city with
significant layers of forested foothills in between.
One of the things that struck me this trip about the whole
so-called Wasatch Front is that it’s become a nearly 100-mile long continuous
urban area from Ogden in the north to the towns south of Provo. The congestion and level of development along
I-15 has become similar to that along I-25 in Colorado. It might not be quite
as populous as the Colorado Front Range, but it’s no longer a place to get away
from metropolitan life. That was
especially surprising to me about Provo, but Utah County where the city is
located now has about 650,000 people and it feels like a substantial
metropolitan area.
I decided to start my day with a drive through Provo Canyon
to Heber City. The canyon begins on the
north side of Provo and extends about 25 miles northeast past towering Mount
Timpanogos and Deer Creek Reservoir. Probably the most impressive site along
the way is Bridal Veil Falls, but being on the south wall of the canyon it was
completely in shadow during to low November sun angle. Compared to most of the narrow canyons
leading into the mountains west of Denver, Provo Canyon is like a broad highway
which explains why so many people now commute from the fast-growing Heber City
area nearer the ski resorts. I intended to make a loop drive back through
American Fork Canyon but discovered the road was closed already for the season
as was Timpanogos Caves National Monument.
I could only go a few miles up the canyon beyond Sundance Ski Resort, a
rustic little place of low-rise wooden buildings that’s a lot less impressive
than what I expected of Robert Redford’s famed development. Apparently not much of the world-famous film
festival actually takes place at the resort with most of the shows in Park City
and Salt Lake City.
Back in town, most of Provo is quite modern sprawl that looks
a lot like suburban cities in California and elsewhere in the West. The old historic
downtown along Center Street has been restored nicely to its old look with plenty
of stores and restaurants. And there are a few quite monumental buildings,
including the Utah County Courthouse, the city library at Academy Square, and the
LDS church’s Provo City Temple. There’s also a second large temple on Temple
Hill in the Wasatch foothills, all beautifully landscaped and brightly lit after
dark. Unlike the Catholics with their
cathedrals, though, the Mormons don’t let non-members go into their temples, so
what’s inside will always remain a mystery to outsiders.
2025-02-10