Salt Lake City, Utah

Where Salt Lake City is

Salt Lake City is the seat of Salt Lake County, at 40.76°N, 111.89°W and about 4,225 ft above sea level, in the Salt Lake Valley between the Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. The Great Salt Lake, the largest lake in the West, lies about 15 miles northwest, and the Jordan River flows north through the west side of the city from Utah Lake to the Great Salt Lake. City Creek and other canyon streams come down from the Wasatch, whose peaks rise above 11,000 ft within 20 miles of downtown. The city is on Mountain Time.

How it became the capital

Brigham Young led the first Mormon pioneer company into the valley on July 24, 1847, and laid out the city on a grid of ten-acre blocks with streets 132 ft wide, numbered from Temple Square. Utah Territory was created in 1850, and in 1851 the legislature chose Fillmore, near the geographic center of the territory, as capital, and built a statehouse there. Only one session met in it. The capital returned to Salt Lake City in 1856, and it stayed when Utah became the 45th state on January 4, 1896.

Population

Salt Lake City had 199,723 residents in 2020, the largest city in Utah, but only by a narrow margin over West Valley City and West Jordan, its suburbs. The city itself holds about 6 percent of the state's 3,271,616. The Salt Lake City metropolitan area has about 1.26 million people, and the Wasatch Front urban corridor from Ogden to Provo about 2.7 million, roughly 80 percent of Utahns.

The capitol

The Utah State Capitol was designed by Richard K. A. Kletting and completed in 1916 on Capitol Hill at the north end of State Street. It is a neoclassical building of Utah granite from Little Cottonwood Canyon, with a copper-covered dome 285 ft high. A base isolation retrofit finished in 2008 placed the entire building on rubber bearings to protect it from the Wasatch Fault, which runs along the foot of the mountains a short distance east.

Distances to other cities

Ogden is about 40 miles north. See the lakes map for the Great Salt Lake.

Related maps

• Utah map — the whole state with borders, cities and counties.
• Salt Lake City city map — the city page with nearby cities and distances.
• Utah county map · blank Utah map · printable Utah map.
• All 50 state capitals on one map, and the state capitals quiz.
• West region · Mountain division · Mountain Time Zone.