Utah

Utah's canyons and plateaus have been home to Ute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo peoples for thousands of years, with ancestral Puebloan sites and rock art still visible near Bears Ears and along the Colorado Plateau. Spanish explorers passed through in the 1700s, but it was Mormon pioneers arriving in 1847, led by Brigham Young into the Salt Lake Valley, who founded the permanent settlements that shaped the territory.

Utah's path to statehood was unusually long, delayed largely over the church's practice of polygamy, which it formally renounced in 1890; statehood finally arrived in 1896 as the 45th state. The transcontinental railroad's completion at Promontory Summit in 1869 opened the territory to trade and migration, while irrigation engineering turned the arid Great Basin into productive farmland.

Today Utah balances a strong Latter-day Saint cultural imprint centred on Salt Lake City with a booming outdoor-recreation economy: five national parks, red-rock canyon country, and some of the driest, lightest powder snow in North America draw skiers to resorts just outside the capital. Mining, tech and a young, fast-growing population round out a state whose landscapes remain its biggest draw.