Salt Lake City Audio Tours

Brigham Young led 148 Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, looked at the Great Basin landscape and reportedly said 'This is the right place.' Within days they had begun digging irrigation ditches. Within years they had a city. Within decades Utah was a state. The story of Salt Lake City is the story of a planned theocratic community that became a modern American metropolis while maintaining an institutional relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that is unlike anything else in the United States: Temple Square, a ten-acre complex in the city's geographic center, holds the Salt Lake Temple (begun 1853, completed 1893), the Tabernacle Choir's home, and the global administrative offices of a church with 17 million members.

The Great Salt Lake west of the city is between two and ten times saltier than the ocean depending on water levels, which in recent decades have dropped severely due to water diversion, creating a body of water so buoyant that you float without effort and so foul-smelling in summer that the salt flats can be detected from downtown on a warm day.

The Bonneville Salt Flats further west have been the site of land speed records since the 1930s, their perfect white surface hosting vehicles attempting to exceed 600 miles per hour on a lake bed dried into sodium chloride. This geological strangeness surrounding the city is not incidental; it explains why Brigham Young chose it.