Salt Lake City Wasn't Nearly As Mormon As We Thought
After we left Yellow Stone, we drove south and ended up in Salt Lake City to visit an old friend. We arrived in the evening just in time to have dinner at one of their highest rated restaurants in (???) where we went for sushi. The downtown was much hipper than we had expected and when we walked into the restaurant it was full of the tattooed and dyed-hair crowd. It was an incredibly hip restaurant with a lot of very hip people and had edgy-artsy feel to it. Not in any way dangerous but the very fun and very interesting. The food was very creative and I thought fantastic. There were a few items there that were very unique unlike anything I’d ever had before and again the quality of sushi was amazing especially considering that we were so far from the ocean.
What surprised my wife was the fact that she wasn’t expecting alcohol to be served because it was such a Mormon town. Everybody in the restaurant, on the other hand, was drinking and there were plenty of people drinking at the bar. We checked into the Marriott Hotel downtown which is near Temple Square, one of the main Mormon centers.
When we walked into the hotel, it felt much more like the Salt Lake City I was expecting. The people who worked at the front desk and the guy who took our bags up to our room were incredibly clean-cut looking people, very nice, very polite and extra honest - at least that’s how they felt. The Marriott by the way had just been renovated. They clearly spent millions of dollars on it and our room was absolutely heaven. Most of the places we’d stayed in in the snowy areas had had some set of static blankets where you were constantly being shocked. The Marriott on the other hand had absolutely phenomenal blankets, and phenomenal beds. It was an absolute luxury for people to get to stay there and I didn’t want to get out.
The next day, we went to see my friend, who lives in the southern part of Salt Lake City at the mouth of one of many canyons. The canyon had been taken up by the people who lived in the areas that are on private projects. There was a lot of volunteer work that went on making sure the canyon was well taken care of. The pads were maintained, branches were cleared and it was absolutely beautiful. There’s a lot of mountain biking, country skiing, a lot of hiking, a lot of jogging - incredibly active community. It appears that each one of the canyons that goes up in the hills had some little community at the base and at least this one, the families and the people of the community were very heavily involved in the canyon.
We’re very proud of this canyon and we enjoyed seeing all the different parts of it very much. In fact, we even had the chance to climb into the first igloo we’ve ever been in our lives. So, it turns out as we studied up a bit more on Salt Lake City, there’s actually now less than half the population of Salt Lake City is Mormon, but there is still a very strong Mormon influence. We had a really, really wonderful time and I’d actually like to spend a lot more time going back and exploring it more.
