Provo and It's Canyon

Thursday, November 07, 2019
Provo, Utah, United States
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.
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