149 Fun Facts About Utah

Utah's statehood was held up for decades by Congress's objection to which practice?

Polygamy was renounced by the church's 1890 Manifesto, yet Congress still made Utah write a ban into its constitution before admitting it as the 45th state in 1896.

Utah's state nickname refers to what?

A beehive stands for industry, the state motto; the settlers called their land Deseret, a word their scripture gives for honeybee, and the hive still sits on the state flag.

Seeing the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, Brigham Young is said to have declared what?

'This is the place' is short for 'This is the right place, drive on', a line Wilford Woodruff first attributed to him more than thirty years later; a monument in Salt Lake City marks the spot.

At which Utah location was the first transcontinental railroad completed in 1869?

Promontory Summit saw the ceremonial swing miss the last spike, but the single word 'done' was wired across the country anyway.

Which university has held the transcontinental railroad's golden spike since the 1890s?

Stanford University's museum was given it by David Hewes, the San Francisco contractor who dreamed up the golden spike and had it cast from his own gold.

What is the highest point in Utah?

Kings Peak has no road anywhere near it, so the usual route from the Henrys Fork trailhead is a round trip of some 28 miles on foot.

Utah is one of the Four Corners states, along with Arizona, New Mexico and which other state?

Colorado's corner sits about 1,800 feet from where Congress intended, yet the marker stands: once the states accepted the survey, its monuments became the legal border.

The name Utah comes from the name of which Native American people?

The Ute name reached English through the Spanish 'Yuta'; Congress chose it for the new territory in 1850 over Deseret, the name the settlers had asked for.

Which coast-to-coast link was completed in Salt Lake City in October 1861, killing off the Pony Express within days?

The transcontinental telegraph was joined in Salt Lake City on 24 October 1861, and Brigham Young sent one of the first messages; the Pony Express announced its closure two days later.

What is the state bird of Utah?

The California gull got the honour because, as the story goes, flocks of gulls ate the crickets devouring the settlers' crops in 1848; a monument in Salt Lake City thanks them.

What is Utah's state flower?

The sego lily was chosen in 1911 because its bulbs, which Native people taught the settlers to eat, had helped feed them through their hungry first years.

Which Utah–Arizona reservoir is named for the one-armed explorer who led an 1869 boat expedition through its canyons?

Lake Powell honours John Wesley Powell, who had lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh and still led a three-month river journey in small wooden boats.

Which Zion National Park trail ends along a narrow rock spine with chains to grip and sheer drops on both sides?

Angels Landing drew such crowds onto its chain-lined final half-mile that since 2022 hikers have needed a permit, handed out by lottery.

Which slogan has sold Utah's skiing on the state's licence plates since 1985?

The Greatest Snow on Earth so irked the Ringling Bros. circus, owner of 'The Greatest Show on Earth', that it sued Utah in the 1990s for diluting its trademark, and lost.

Salt Lake City's street addresses all count outward from a corner of which landmark?

Temple Square's south-eastern corner is the zero point of the grid, so every address in the valley is simply a count of blocks from that one corner.

Utah's highest temperatures on record have been measured in or near which city?

St. George lies in the low south-west corner where the Mojave Desert reaches Utah; the state's record low, minus 69 °F, came from Peter Sinks, a mountain basin far to the north.

Which metal set off a 1950s prospecting rush in south-eastern Utah after Charlie Steen struck it rich?

Uranium was what the atomic age wanted; Steen, an out-of-work geologist, named his 1952 strike Mi Vida, 'my life', and made millions from it.

Brine shrimp eggs harvested from the Great Salt Lake are mostly sold as what?

Fish-farm feed: the dormant eggs keep for years, so prawn and fish hatcheries in Asia and South America hatch them on demand as live food for their young.

Utah's great inland sea is the remnant of which giant prehistoric lake?

Lake Bonneville overtopped Red Rock Pass in Idaho and sent a catastrophic flood down the Snake River; what was left shrank away later as the climate grew warmer and drier.

What is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake, now a state park with a bison herd?

Antelope Island was named by John C. Frémont and Kit Carson, who hunted pronghorn there in 1845; the bison it is now known for were only brought over in 1893.

Balanced Rock, the Windows and the Fiery Furnace are sights in which Utah national park?

Arches has over 2,000 documented stone arches, the densest concentration in the world, because a buried salt layer bulged upward and cracked the sandstone above it into thin walls.

Which Utah desert town, famed for its Slickrock mountain-bike trail, is the gateway to two national parks?

Moab was once a farm town, then a mining town, and now lives on park visitors, mountain bikers and the off-roaders of its annual Jeep Safari.

Bryce Canyon's namesake Ebenezer Bryce supposedly called it 'a helluva place to' do what?

'A helluva place to lose a cow' is the line tradition gives the homesteader, who grazed cattle there in the 1870s; the 'canyon' is really a row of amphitheatres eaten into a plateau's edge.

What was Zion National Park called when it was first protected as a national monument in 1909?

Mukuntuweap lasted only nine years: in 1918 the Park Service renamed the monument Zion, the name Mormon settlers used, and Congress made it a national park the following year.

Which river carved Zion Canyon?

The Virgin River still fills the canyon wall to wall in the Narrows, a gorge at times only 20 to 30 feet wide, so hikers there walk upstream in the river itself.

Which two rivers meet inside Canyonlands National Park, dividing it into districts?

The Colorado and the Green are both calm above their meeting point, the Confluence; below it their combined flow crashes through the whitewater of Cataract Canyon.

Capitol Reef National Park is built around which nearly 100-mile geological feature?

The Waterpocket Fold, a warp in the Earth's crust, has cliffs that blocked travellers like a reef at sea, giving the park half its name; the other half comes from white sandstone domes that recalled the US Capitol.

Which Briton first topped 300 mph on land, on Utah's salt flats in 1935?

Malcolm Campbell had set five records on the sand at Daytona Beach before he tried Utah's salt, where he averaged 301 mph over two runs; it was his last land speed record.

Which fast-food chain's first franchise opened in South Salt Lake, Utah, in 1952?

KFC began as a dish on the menu of Pete Harman's restaurant after his friend Harland Sanders shared the recipe; Harman later came up with the chain's cardboard bucket.

Which golden figure tops the Salt Lake Temple's tallest spire?

The angel Moroni, a hammered-metal figure covered in gold leaf, was sculpted by Cyrus Dallin; a 2020 earthquake shook the trumpet out of its hand.

Legend says Salt Lake City's wide streets were laid out so what could turn around?

An ox team hitched to a wagon is the popular answer, but the 132-foot width more likely follows a plan Joseph Smith had drawn up for an ideal city years earlier.

Which former silver-mining town in the Wasatch mountains hosted Sundance for more than four decades?

Park City was close to a ghost town by the 1950s, after silver prices fell; skiing saved it, and its resorts went on to stage skiing and snowboarding events at the 2002 Winter Olympics.

What was the motto of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics?

Light the Fire Within shaped the cauldron itself, built of glass so the flame could be seen burning inside it, and was the title of the song LeAnn Rimes sang once it was lit.

Powder, one of three 2002 Winter Olympic mascots named for Utah's natural resources, was which animal?

A snowshoe hare, white as the snow she was named for; the public voted on the three mascots' names from suggestions sent in by Utah schoolchildren.

Who was hired in 1999 to rescue the scandal-hit Salt Lake Olympic organising committee?

Mitt Romney took leave from Bain Capital for the job, and the Games' success relaunched his political career: he was elected governor of Massachusetts later the same year.

The Utah Jazz kept their name after moving from which city in 1979?

New Orleans is where jazz was born, which is why the name made sense there; the team carried it north along with its Mardi Gras colours of purple, gold and green.

Which two Utah Jazz teammates made the pick-and-roll their trademark through the 1990s?

John Stockton and Karl Malone were teammates for 18 seasons, and Stockton fed him so often that he retired with the most assists in NBA history, a record that still stands.

Which team beat the Utah Jazz in both the 1997 and 1998 NBA Finals?

Chicago Bulls won the 1998 title on a steal and a jump shot over Bryon Russell with 5.2 seconds left, the basket that sealed their sixth championship in eight years.

What was Sundance called when it began in Salt Lake City in 1978?

The Utah/US Film Festival was launched to attract film-makers to the state; it later moved to a ski town, switched from late summer to January, and took the name Sundance only in 1991.

In March 2025 Sundance announced it would leave Utah for which city from 2027?

Boulder, Colorado, beat Cincinnati and a home-state Utah bid in the final round and signed the festival for ten years; the institute's film-makers' labs are staying behind in Utah.

Utah's beloved 'fry sauce' is a mix of mayonnaise and what?

Ketchup and mayonnaise made the 'pink sauce' Don Carlos Edwards served at his barbecue restaurant in the 1940s and then at Arctic Circle, the drive-in chain that spread it across the state.

In 2001 the Utah State Senate recognised which food as 'a favorite snack food of Utah'?

Jell-O got the honour after Des Moines, Iowa, edged out Salt Lake City in 1999 as the city that ate the most of it, and Utahns rallied to 'Take Back the Title'.

What is Utah's official state cooking pot?

The Dutch oven crossed the plains with the pioneers who settled the West; a statue honouring the handcart companies that walked into the Salt Lake Valley shows one hanging from the front of the cart.

Utah's state fossil is which Jurassic meat-eater, found in huge numbers at the Cleveland-Lloyd quarry?

Allosaurus bones from at least 46 animals have come out of the quarry, where meat-eaters far outnumber their prey, and nobody has settled why so many predators died together.

Which pistol did Utah adopt in 2011 as its official state firearm?

The Browning M1911 was chosen to honour its designer, John Browning, who was born and raised in Ogden; the vote made Utah the first state to name an official firearm.

Which fruit, of which Utah is a leading US grower of the tart kind, is its official state fruit?

Cherry earned the title in 1997 on the strength of the orchards: Utah ranks second among the states for tart cherries, the kind baked into pies.

Which Utah-born inventor demonstrated the first fully electronic television system in the 1920s?

Philo Farnsworth, a farm boy, traced the idea of scanning a picture line by line to the back-and-forth rows of a ploughed field; his first transmitted image, in 1927, was a single straight line.

Bingham Canyon, the huge open-pit mine near Salt Lake City, is worked chiefly for which metal?

Copper has come out of the pit since 1906, more than from any other mine in history, leaving a hole over three-quarters of a mile deep; it is also Utah's official state mineral.

Which family act from Ogden, Utah, began as a barbershop quartet on The Andy Williams Show before its 1970s pop hits?

The Osmonds first sang in public, by their own account, to earn money for hearing aids for their two eldest brothers, who were born with severe hearing loss.

Which word processor, the market leader of the late 1980s, was written at Brigham Young University and sold from Orem, Utah?

WordPerfect began as a job for the city of Orem's minicomputer; professor Alan Ashton and student Bruce Bastian kept the rights, built a company on it, and lost the lead to Word only after the move to Windows.

Which director made Monument Valley, on the Utah–Arizona line, his Western backdrop, starting with Stagecoach in 1939?

John Ford returned for My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache and The Searchers, until the valley's few square miles became what filmgoers pictured when they thought of the West.

Which sandstone span in southern Utah, sacred to the Navajo, is among the world's largest natural bridges?

Rainbow Bridge stands 290 feet high, nearly the height of the Statue of Liberty; once reached only by days of river and trail, it became a boat trip when a reservoir rose into its canyon in the 1960s.

Which mountain man is usually credited as the first person of European descent to reach the Great Salt Lake, in 1824?

Jim Bridger got there by floating down the Bear River in a bull boat; another trapping party reached the lake at about the same time, which is why the credit comes with a hedge.

Which town, named after a U.S. president, was the Utah Territory's first capital before Salt Lake City?

Fillmore was laid out near the territory's geographic centre and named for President Millard Fillmore, yet the legislature held only one full session there, in 1855, before going back to Salt Lake City.

The Utah city of Provo is named after which 1825 visitor to the area?

A French-Canadian fur trapper, Étienne Provost, survived an ambush in 1824 that killed most of his party; the settlement first called Fort Utah took his name in 1850.

Why is Utah's warm southwestern corner nicknamed 'Utah's Dixie'?

Early settlers grew cotton there because Brigham Young sent some 300 families south in 1861 to raise it, fearing the Civil War would cut off supplies; the crop never really paid.

Which Utah-born drink craze, spread by drive-through chains like Swig, mixes soda with cream and flavoured syrups?

Dirty soda took off among Latter-day Saints, whose health code rules out alcohol, coffee and tea; the first shop opened in southern Utah in 2010 and trademarked the name three years later.

Salt Lake City International Airport serves as a hub for which airline?

Delta inherited the hub in 1987 when it absorbed Western Airlines, whose very first flight, in 1926, had carried mail between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

Which 1776 expedition led by two Catholic priests reached as far north as Utah Lake?

The Domínguez–Escalante party set out from Santa Fe to find a route to Monterey in California; with snow on every pass ahead, the friars gave up and turned for home.

Which 2010 film tells how hiker Aron Ralston freed himself after a boulder pinned his arm in a Utah canyon?

127 Hours is how long he was trapped in Bluejohn Canyon in 2003 before he cut off his own forearm with a pocket knife, abseiled down a cliff and hiked out to be rescued.

The University of Utah was one of the four original nodes of which 1969 computer network?

ARPANET's first four nodes were running by December 1969, three in California and one in Utah, where the same agency was already funding a centre for computer graphics.

Which object, modelled at the University of Utah in 1975, became 3D graphics' 'Hello, World'?

Martin Newell sketched his wife's Melitta teapot on graph paper; the original sits in the Computer History Museum.

Pando, a 47,000-stem organism in Fishlake National Forest, is a single clone of which tree?

Quaking aspen trunks in the grove are all one male plant, joined by a root system spread over 106 acres, which makes Pando the heaviest known tree on Earth; the species is also Utah's state tree.

In 2007 Natural Bridges National Monument became the world's first park certified for what?

Dark skies over the park show thousands of stars where a city shows fewer than 500; the certificate recognised the work done to keep stray light out as well as the remoteness.

Spiral Jetty, the 1970 land artwork coiling into the Great Salt Lake, was built by which sculptor?

Robert Smithson built the 1,500-foot coil of basalt and earth while the water was low; the lake covered it in 1972, and it stayed hidden until drought brought it back thirty years later.

Which wartime camp in central Utah confined thousands of Japanese Americans and ranked as the state's fifth-largest city?

Topaz's inmates built a community behind the wire: the painter Chiura Obata, held there himself, founded and ran its art school.

The 1968 Dugway incident killed some 6,000 of which animals after an Army nerve-agent test?

Sheep on ranches in Skull Valley died by the thousand, and the outcry fed into President Nixon's decision the following year to renounce America's biological weapons programme.

Seraph Young made history in Salt Lake City in February 1870 as the first woman in Utah Territory to do what?

Vote in an election: Wyoming had passed its suffrage law first, but Utah held two elections before any Wyoming woman cast a ballot, so Young went first in the whole country under such a law.

In 1896 Martha Hughes Cannon became the first female US state senator by defeating whom?

Her own husband, Angus, was on the same ballot and she finished ahead of him; as a senator she wrote the law that set up Utah's first state board of health.

Gary Gilmore, the first American executed after the 1976 Gregg ruling, chose which method in Utah?

Firing squad or hanging was the choice Utah then offered, and he feared a hanging could be botched; his last words, 'Let's do it', later gave ad man Dan Wieden the idea for Nike's 'Just Do It'.

The wagon train attacked at Mountain Meadows in 1857 was mostly families from which state?

Arkansas families made up most of the Baker–Fancher party, bound for California; the attackers spared only seventeen small children, who were sent back to relatives two years later.

Which outlaw was born Robert LeRoy Parker in Beaver, Utah, in 1866?

Butch Cassidy built his alias in two steps: 'Butch' from a spell working for a butcher in Wyoming, and 'Cassidy' in honour of Mike Cassidy, the cattle thief who had been his mentor.

Which video game company was founded by Clearfield, Utah native Nolan Bushnell?

Atari grew out of a student job: Bushnell ran arcade games at a Utah amusement park while at university, watching what kept customers playing, and later also started Chuck E. Cheese.

BYU's 1984 national football championship was sealed by beating which team in the Holiday Bowl?

Michigan came in unranked at 6–5, the best opponent the bowl could sign after bigger names turned down its small payout; BYU still trailed in the fourth quarter before winning 24–17.

Real Salt Lake won the 2009 MLS Cup by beating which club in a penalty shoot-out?

LA Galaxy had David Beckham and Landon Donovan, while Real Salt Lake had scraped into the play-offs on the final day as the lowest seed; goalkeeper Nick Rimando's two shoot-out saves settled it.

Utah's NHL Mammoth, which debuted in 2024, took over the players of which suspended franchise?

Arizona Coyotes had spent two seasons in a 4,600-seat college arena with no new home in sight, so the league moved their players and staff to a new Utah team, which played its first year as Utah Hockey Club.

As of 2025, Alta and Deer Valley are two of only three US ski areas that ban what?

Snowboarders even took Alta to federal court in 2014 to get its ban lifted, and it still stands; the third hold-out is Mad River Glen in Vermont.

Utah senator Jake Garn in 1985 became the first sitting member of Congress to do what?

Fly in space he did, aboard the shuttle Discovery, but he was so ill that astronauts jokingly rate space sickness in 'Garns', with one Garn the worst it can get.

Who became Utah's first, and as of 2025 only, female governor in 2003?

Olene Walker stepped up from lieutenant governor when Mike Leavitt left to run the Environmental Protection Agency, but her own party's convention kept her off the primary ballot the following year.

Which US president sent an army to Utah in 1857 to replace Brigham Young as governor?

James Buchanan's army never fought a battle: negotiators arranged a pardon for the settlers, the new governor took office peacefully, and the troops were kept at a distance from Salt Lake City.

The Deseret alphabet, developed under Brigham Young in the early 1850s, tried to reform what?

English spelling was to give way to 38 new letters, one for each sound; the church printed school primers and scripture in them, but the type was costly and few of the books sold.

Utah's Bear River holds which North American record?

Longest river never reaching the sea: the Bear rises in Utah's Uinta Mountains, loops north through Wyoming and Idaho, and curls back to end in the Great Salt Lake, which has no outlet.

Which Utah river carries fresh water from Utah Lake north into the Great Salt Lake?

The Jordan got its name because settlers saw the likeness to the Holy Land, where the river of that name drains the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea; they first called it the Western Jordan.

Which president created Bears Ears National Monument in south-eastern Utah during his final weeks in office?

Barack Obama acted at the request of a coalition of five tribes, who were given a share in managing the land; within a year Donald Trump had cut it by 85 percent, the first of several redrawings.

Where did Bill Clinton hold the 1996 ceremony proclaiming a vast new national monument in southern Utah?

The Grand Canyon, a state away in Arizona, was the backdrop, weeks before the 1996 election; back in Utah, a senator called the new monument 'the mother of all land grabs'.

Who proposed in 2018 that Utahraptor become the official state dinosaur?

A 10-year-old student, Kenyon Roberts, made the case to lawmakers; the bill at first meant to swap out the existing state fossil, and ended by giving the raptor a title of its own.

Which interstate crosses Utah's San Rafael Swell on a 110-mile stretch with no services, the longest on the system?

I-70 between Salina and Green River follows no earlier road: it was the longest highway built over a completely new route in the United States since the Alaska Highway.

Which 1984 dance film used Payson High School and a Lehi flour mill, both in Utah County, as locations?

Footloose put its hero to work at the Lehi Roller Mills, and Kevin Bacon briefly took a job at the mill himself to prepare for the part.

Disney's High School Musical was filmed mainly at which real Salt Lake City high school?

East High kept its own name on screen even though the story is set in New Mexico, and the real school became a stop for tourists, dozens a day in the summer of 2007.

Which cult horror film, shot around Morgan, Utah, in 1989, is set in a town called Nilbog?

Troll 2 contains no trolls, only goblins, which is Nilbog spelled backwards; its Italian crew spoke little English, and its child star later made a documentary about it, Best Worst Movie.

Crumbl Cookies was founded in 2017 by two cousins in which Utah college town?

Logan is home to Utah State University, where co-founder Sawyer Hemsley was still a student; he and his cousin arrived at their first chocolate chip recipe by A/B testing batches.

Dixie State University renamed itself what in 2022?

Utah Tech University became the name on 1 July 2022; the teams had long since dropped Rebels and had been the Trailblazers since 2016, though lawmakers required the main campus to be named the Dixie Campus.

Which Salt Lake City software engineer and BYU graduate won 74 straight games of Jeopardy! in 2004?

Ken Jennings finally lost his 75th game, to Nancy Zerg, having won more than $2.5 million; the contestant went on to become the show's host in 2021.

Retired dentist Barney Clark made history at the University of Utah in 1982 by receiving the first permanent artificial what?

Heart: the Jarvik-7 kept him alive for 112 days, but it left him tethered by hoses to a pneumatic drive console that weighed some 400 pounds.

Which actor bought the Timp Haven ski area in 1968 and grew it into Sundance Resort?

Robert Redford first bought a two-acre lot there for $500, then the whole ski area, which he renamed after a role in a 1969 Western; he sold the resort in 2020 and lived there until his death in 2025.

The railway causeway across the Great Salt Lake has turned the water of its cut-off north arm what colour?

Reddish purple: almost no rivers feed the north arm, so it is far saltier than the south, and the salt-loving algae and microbes that thrive there tint the water.

Inheritance tax on which kind of tycoon's estate helped pay for Utah's State Capitol?

Railroad magnate: E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific died in 1909, and Utah's inheritance tax obliged his widow to hand the state treasurer $798,546.

Gary Gabelich's 1970 land-speed record on Utah's salt flats came in which rocket car, fuelled by natural gas?

Blue Flame was bankrolled by the American gas industry to show off its fuel; its 622 mph mark stood for thirteen years, until Thrust2 beat it in 1983.

Which ill-fated 1846 emigrant group took the Hastings Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake Desert?

The Donner Party lost cattle, wagons and precious weeks on the 80-mile, nearly waterless crossing, and the delay left them snowbound in the Sierra Nevada that winter.

Which bird perches with outstretched wings on top of the shield on Utah's historic state flag and seal?

An American eagle tops the shield, which is pierced by six crossed arrows and flanked by two national flags. The seal's designers were paid $65 for the artwork in 1896.

Which mild word completes 'oh my ...', a euphemistic exclamation often cited as typical Utah speech?

Heck is the example a Salt Lake Tribune report on Utah English gave for the state's euphemistic swearing, and the paper's headline on a BYU linguist's survey punned on the same word.

The Utah county holding most of Bryce Canyon is named for which US president, killed by an assassin months earlier?

James Garfield had been dead only six months when Utah's territorial legislature carved the county out of Iron County in March 1882. Its seat is the little town of Panguitch.

A Utah teenager who 'sluffs' a class is doing what, a usage linguists found in no other state?

Skipping it is the meaning: only Utahns say 'sluff school', a BYU linguist found after surveying 1,700 locals. It was one of very few expressions that proved truly unique to the state.

When Brigham Young's settlers reached the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, the land was still claimed by which country?

Mexico had claimed the region since 1821 but kept little presence there. It handed the land to the United States just months later, in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Which Utah county, whose seat is Price, is named for a chemical element?

Carbon County was split from Emery County in 1894, once a new railway had opened up the coalfields along the Price River. The name was chosen to stress the area's industrial character.

On the Utah state flag approved in 2023, the red band along the bottom stands for which landscape?

Southern desert canyons earned the bottom stripe, which also stands for the spirit of perseverance. The blue band at the top represents Utah's skies and lakes.

Order a 'scone' at a Utah diner and which treat arrives, usually with butter and honey?

A deep-fried pastry is what Utahns mean: a sweet yeast dough closer to Native American frybread or a French-style beignet than to the dense British teatime bake of the same name.

Which shape frames the central emblem of Utah's 2023 state flag, chosen to represent the strength of its people?

The hexagon is outlined in gold and sits on a white band cut into five peaks, which stand for the state's mountains. The whole tricolour borrows its colours from the national flag.

Which Utah county, the state's largest by area, fills the south-eastern corner and touches the Four Corners?

San Juan County is named for its river, which Spanish explorers christened in honour of Saint John. Its seat is little Monticello, although Blanding is the county's most populous town.

Daggett County, Utah's least populous, has its seat in which town named for an 1898 American naval victory?

Manila took its name from the Battle of Manila Bay, fought the year the settlement was named. It became a county seat in 1918, after locals tired of a trip of hundreds of miles around the mountains to reach the old one.

Which small city, called the 'Mother Town of the Southwest', is the seat of Utah's Iron County?

Parowan earned the title because so many settlers left it to found other towns across southern Utah and beyond. Founded in January 1851, it is far smaller than the county's biggest city.

Which northern Utah county beside Bear Lake is named for a Mormon apostle who settled the valley in 1863?

Rich County honours Charles C. Rich, whom Brigham Young asked in 1863 to open up the Bear Lake Valley, where he founded a string of towns. The county was first called Richland.

Juab County's seat, on Interstate 15 in central Utah, is named after which Book of Mormon figure?

Nephi replaced the town's first name, Salt Creek. It was the only real settlement in the area when Juab County was carved out of Utah County in 1852.

Which tiny Wayne County seat was named by a returned Mormon missionary after a volcano he had seen on his mission?

Loa takes the second word of Mauna Loa, the huge Hawaiian volcano its namer knew from his mission in the islands. Barely 500 people live in the town, which has had a post office since 1879.

NASA's Genesis capsule crash-landed in 2004 in which Utah county, home to the Dugway Proving Ground?

Tooele County's empty desert was meant to host a mid-air helicopter catch, but the capsule's parachute never opened. Some of its solar-wind collectors were still recovered for study.

Kane County's seat is which Utah town, nicknamed 'Little Hollywood' for the many Westerns filmed around it?

Kanab has stood in for the Old West in productions such as The Lone Ranger and Death Valley Days. Kane County itself is named for Thomas L. Kane, a friend of the early Latter-day Saints.

Which Salt Lake suburb, Utah's second-largest municipality by population, staged the 2002 Winter Olympic ice hockey?

West Valley City was created only in 1980, when the communities of Granger, Hunter, Chesterfield and Redwood merged. Its arena hosted the men's and women's Olympic tournaments 22 years later.

Which city thirteen miles south of downtown Salt Lake is the actual home of MLS club Real Salt Lake?

Sandy has housed the club's soccer-specific stadium since it opened in October 2008. The ground is shared with the Utah Royals of the National Women's Soccer League.

Which city, the most populous in Utah's Davis County, boomed after Hill Air Force Base opened next door?

Layton grew fast once the base was created to its north in 1940, on the eve of America's entry into the Second World War. It is named for Christopher Layton, a Latter-day Saint settler and leader.

Which southern Utah college town hosts the Utah Shakespeare Festival, winner of a Tony Award for regional theatre?

Cedar City's festival was dreamed up in 1961 by a theatre professor and his fiancée while they did their washing at a local laundromat. It won the Tony for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 2000.

The Enola Gay's crew trained during the Second World War at an airfield beside which Utah border town?

Wendover's remote airfield suited the secret training of the 509th Composite Group, the B-29 unit behind both atomic bombings. Across the state line, its twin town now runs on casinos.

Which eastern Utah city is home to the 'Parcel Post Bank', faced with bricks sent through the mail in 1916?

Vernal's banker found parcel post the cheapest way to haul bricks, posting them in fifty-pound packages. Once they were delivered, the Post Office hastily capped senders at 200 pounds a day.

Which Davis County city, founded by Perrigrine Sessions in 1847, was the second Mormon pioneer settlement in Utah?

Bountiful was first known as Sessions Settlement, and took its present name in 1855 from a city in the Book of Mormon. The name also suited the area's reputation for good gardening.

Which Utah town near Price is named for the railroad engines once stationed there for the climb to Soldier Summit?

Helper housed the extra 'helper' engines the Denver and Rio Grande Western coupled on for the steep 15-mile climb up Price Canyon. The town sits at the western end of the Book Cliffs.

Which Heber Valley town is known for Swiss-style architecture and a Swiss Days festival founded in 1947?

Midway's Swiss theme was created by a screenwriter whose family owned a local resort, as a way to pull in tourists. Some neighbourhoods now require new houses to carry Swiss-style features.

Which nickname did Salt Lake City earn as mining booms, immigrants and rail lines all converged on it?

Crossroads of the West still fits: two cross-country freeways, I-15 and I-80, intersect in the city. The label dates from the era when the first coast-to-coast railway brought the city its growth.

Which name do many Utahns give the roly-poly, a term early settlers likely carried from New York and Ohio?

Potato bug is heard in only two other pockets, on the southern shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Those are the areas around Palmyra and Kirtland, where the early Latter-day Saints lived before moving west.

Older Utahns' exclamations such as 'for cute!' are traced by linguists to immigrants from which region?

Scandinavia sent Utah huge numbers of immigrants, and its languages use interjections on the pattern of 'for beautiful!'. The same phrases survive in Minnesota and Iowa for the same reason.

What colloquial nickname do Utahns give the Provo–Orem area around Brigham Young University?

Happy Valley is the everyday name for Utah Valley, whose rivers all drain into the shallow freshwater lake at its centre. The other three labels belong to tourist regions elsewhere in the state.

Until a 2017 reform, Utah restaurants needed 'Zion Curtains', partitions that hid what from diners?

Drinks being mixed had to stay out of sight behind a solid, translucent barrier, often made of frosted glass. The nickname was adapted from the Iron Curtain.

In modern Utah slang, a 'Jack Mormon' is usually understood to be which kind of person?

A lapsed member is today's meaning, but in the 1840s the label meant something else: an outsider who was friendly to the Latter-day Saints without being baptised as one.

Nineteenth-century Mormons in Utah used which biblical word in everyday speech for people outside their church?

Gentile fitted because Latter-day Saints regard themselves as regathered Israelites, which made everyone else an outsider. The everyday usage declined through the twentieth century.

Utah's first state flag was created in 1903 to be carried at a world's fair in which city?

St. Louis was staging the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and Utah's governor marched under the new banner in its parade of states. The flag was plain blue with the state seal hand-embroidered in white thread.

The gold ring on Utah's historic state flag first appeared on a 1912 copy made as a gift for what?

A Navy battleship, the newly commissioned USS Utah, was due the copy, but the maker added the ring and full colour unasked. Rather than have it remade, lawmakers changed the law to match the flag.

A flag maker's slip in 1922, copied for 89 years on Utah's state flag, put what in the wrong place?

The year 1847 was stitched just above 1896 instead of on the shield, and every later maker copied that flag as a model. Lawmakers finally ordered the slip corrected in 2011.

Which Utah governor signed the 2023 bill replacing the blue seal flag with a red, white and blue design?

Spencer Cox signed it on March 21, 2023, and added an executive order keeping the old flag flying above the state capitol every day of the year.

Opponents of Utah's 2023 flag tried to force which kind of public vote, but fell short on signatures?

A ballot referendum needed 134,298 signatures, and the campaign fell well short. The old design survives regardless, re-designated the Historic State Flag with co-official status.

An early version of Utah's 2023 flag had an eight-pointed star, dropped after a complaint that it resembled what?

An asterisk is what an Indigenous constituent said it looked like from a distance, so a five-pointed star took its place. The eight points had stood for Utah's eight federally recognised tribal nations.

Which US president signed the 1894 Enabling Act that finally cleared the way for Utah's statehood?

Grover Cleveland signed it during his second term, and Utah joined the Union as the 45th state on January 4, 1896. Congress had been turning down its petitions for almost half a century.

Which insects swarmed the Salt Lake Valley settlers' fields in 1848 and now carry the name 'Mormon' as a result?

Crickets in name only: the flightless swarmers are really katydids. They eat every plant in their path, along with any of their own kind that die on the way.

From 1856, nearly 3,000 Mormon converts too poor to buy wagons walked to Utah pulling their belongings in what?

Handcarts served ten companies, but two that set out late in 1856 were caught by severe winter weather in Wyoming. More than 210 of their 980 members died despite a dramatic rescue effort.

Utah Territory was created by which famous package of laws that also admitted California as a free state?

The Compromise of 1850 set out to keep the balance between free and slave states. The Utah bill was signed into law on the very day California entered the Union.

Which Swedish-born labor songwriter of the Industrial Workers of the World was executed in Salt Lake City in 1915?

Joe Hill had been convicted of murdering a Salt Lake grocer. Pleas for clemency from President Woodrow Wilson and a Swedish diplomat delayed the sentence but could not stop it.

In December 1933 Utah's convention cast the final ratifying vote needed to end which nationwide policy?

Prohibition was repealed once Utah's state convention unanimously ratified the Twenty-first Amendment. Washington certified the result just 17 minutes after the vote in Salt Lake City.

The Latter-day Saints who settled Utah had been forced out of which Illinois city on the Mississippi?

Nauvoo had swollen to some 12,000 people by 1844, among the largest cities in Illinois. Violence after Joseph Smith's death then forced most of the Saints to leave.

Which neighbouring state was carved out of the western part of Utah Territory after the Comstock Lode silver strike?

Nevada Territory was split off in 1861, as the Comstock silver rush drew crowds of non-Mormon miners to the territory's western edge. It became a state in 1864, more than thirty years before Utah managed it.

Which explorer, nicknamed 'the Pathfinder', coined the name Great Basin for the region around the Great Salt Lake?

John Frémont worked out that the region has no outlet to any ocean. That finding killed off the legend of a Buenaventura River flowing out of it towards the coast.

Which nickname, born in a tech founder's branding campaign, describes Utah's cluster of software firms around Lehi?

Silicon Slopes was coined by Josh James, founder of the software firm Domo, to promote Utah's growing technology community. The area runs along the Wasatch Front between Salt Lake City and Provo.

Locals say which southern Utah town's name with an 'uh' at the end, a habit linguists trace to British settlers?

Hurricane never rhymes with 'rain' in Utah, which took in British settlers later than most of the country did. The town was named after a whirlwind blew the top off a church leader's buggy.