100 Fun Facts About Utah

Utah became a state on 4 January of which year?

It was the 45th state; statehood had been delayed for decades by disputes over polygamy.

Utah's official nickname refers to what?

The beehive is a symbol of industry, and 'Industry' is the state motto.

On what date did Brigham Young and the first Mormon pioneers reach the Salt Lake Valley?

Utah still marks the day as Pioneer Day, a state holiday.

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

Leland Stanford drove the ceremonial golden spike on 10 May.

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

It weighed just over 14 troy ounces of 17.6-karat gold and joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines.

What is the highest point in Utah?

It stands 13,528 feet in the Uinta Mountains, the highest range in the contiguous US that runs east to west.

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

It is the only spot in the US where four states meet at a single point.

The name Utah comes from the English name of which Native American tribe?

Brigham Young had wanted to call the territory Deseret, a Book of Mormon word for honeybee.

In which year did the LDS Church issue the Manifesto banning polygamy, clearing the way for statehood?

Statehood followed six years later.

What is the state bird of Utah?

Legend says the gulls saved the pioneers' 1848 crops by devouring a plague of crickets.

What is Utah's state flower?

Pioneers ate its bulbs during lean years, which is why it was chosen.

Utah ranks where among US states by area?

Its population of just over three million ranks around 30th.

Utah is the only state in which every county contains some of what?

More than 60 percent of the state's land is federally owned or protected.

Utah's ski slogan, adopted in the 1980s, calls its powder what?

Parts of the Wasatch Range in the lake-effect zone get up to 500 inches a year.

Roughly what share of Utahns are Latter-day Saints?

The share is falling as the Wasatch Front's tech economy draws newcomers.

Utah's record high temperature, 118 °F, was set in 2007 near which city?

The record low of minus 69 °F was measured at Peter Sinks in 1985.

The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in which part of the world?

It is a remnant of a vast prehistoric lake and has no outlet to the sea.

The Great Salt Lake supplies roughly what share of the world's brine shrimp?

The tiny cysts are harvested in autumn and sold as fish-farm feed.

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

At its greatest extent it was nearly as large as Lake Michigan.

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

The lake fell to its smallest recorded area, 950 square miles, in 2021.

Which Utah national park has the world's highest density of natural stone spans, over 2,000?

That is the highest density of natural arches in the world; Delicate Arch appears on the state's quarter and licence plates.

Delicate Arch and its 2,000 neighbours sit four miles north of which Utah town?

Canyonlands is also near Moab, on the other side of the Colorado River.

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

Despite its name it is not a canyon but a row of natural amphitheatres full of hoodoos.

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

Congress renamed it Zion when it became Utah's first national park in 1919.

Which river carved Zion Canyon?

The Narrows, where the canyon shrinks to 20 feet wide, is hiked in the riverbed itself.

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

Island in the Sky, the Needles and the Maze are the three land districts.

Capitol Reef National Park is built around a nearly 100-mile wrinkle in the Earth's crust called what?

'Reef' is local slang for any rocky barrier to travel; the 'Capitol' is its white sandstone domes.

Utah's famous salt flats near Wendover have hosted land-speed record attempts since which year?

Teddy Tetzlaff set the first; Speed Week is still held there every August.

Salt Lake City dropped which word from its original name in 1868?

It had been founded as Great Salt Lake City by Brigham Young in 1847.

How long did the Salt Lake Temple take to build?

Construction started in 1853 and it was dedicated in April 1893.

Salt Lake City's downtown streets are famously wide; the original plan set them at how many feet across?

Legend says it was so an ox team could turn round without swearing.

Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002 and has been chosen to host them again in which year?

The IOC confirmed the bid on 24 July 2024, Pioneer Day.

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

They were the first Olympics after the September 11 attacks, and Mitt Romney ran the organising committee.

The 2002 Winter Olympic mascots were a snowshoe hare, a coyote and a black bear; what were they called?

The names nod to Utah's snow, its copper mines and its coal.

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

He went on to become governor of Massachusetts and the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.

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

The franchise had been an expansion team there since 1974.

Which two Utah Jazz stars formed one of the most famous pick-and-roll duos in NBA history?

They took the Jazz to the 1997 and 1998 Finals, losing both to Michael Jordan's Bulls.

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

Jerry Sloan coached the Jazz through their 1990s peak.

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

It became the largest independent film festival in the US, but is moving to Boulder, Colorado, from 2027.

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

The Sundance Institute's labs will stay at Sundance Resort.

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

Don Carlos Edwards served it in the 1940s and at the first Arctic Circle drive-in in Salt Lake City in 1950.

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

Green Jell-O in particular is a running joke about the state's Mormon culture.

What is Utah's official state cooking pot?

Pioneers cooked in them, and a World Championship Dutch Oven Cookoff is held near Logan each summer.

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

The quarry holds the densest concentration of Jurassic fossils ever found.

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

Browning was born in Ogden and designed guns there for decades.

Utah's state fruit is which crop, whose trees line the Capitol grounds as a gift from Japan?

They were planted just after the Second World War.

Which Utah-born inventor, honoured with a statue in the US Capitol, got the first patent for electronic television?

His image dissector transmitted a straight line in a San Francisco lab in September 1927.

Bingham Canyon, southwest of Salt Lake City, is the world's deepest open-pit mine; what does it produce?

The pit is more than three-quarters of a mile deep and has been worked since 1906.

Brigham Young was appointed the first governor of the Utah Territory in 1851 by which US president?

Fillmore County and its seat, Fillmore, were named in thanks.

Roughly how many towns did Brigham Young direct the founding of between 1847 and 1877?

He had 56 wives and 57 children, and died in Salt Lake City in August 1877.

Which director used Monument Valley as a Western backdrop, starting with Stagecoach in 1939?

Its sandstone buttes rise up to 1,000 feet, and it lies within the Navajo Nation.

Rainbow Bridge, near Lake Powell, is one of the world's largest natural bridges; roughly how tall is it?

It was protected as a national monument in 1910 and is sacred to the Navajo.

Which mountain man in 1824 became the first known English speaker to see the Great Salt Lake?

Tasting the salty water, he thought he had reached the Pacific Ocean.

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

The territory was created by the Compromise of 1850; Salt Lake City took over as capital in 1856.

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

Étienne Provost gave Provo its name, while Ogden honours the Canadian fur trader Peter Skene Ogden.

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

The region holds the state's lowest point, Beaverdam Wash at 2,000 feet, and the northern tip of the Mojave Desert.

How many counties has Utah had since 1918?

They range from 298 to 7,819 square miles in size.

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

It is the state's only international airport and has repeatedly ranked first among U.S. airports for on-time departures.

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

They had set out from Santa Fe seeking a route to the California coast; Spain never bothered to colonise the desert region.

Utah has the highest birth rate of any U.S. state, which gives it what demographic distinction?

Its birth rate runs about 25 percent above the national average, and life expectancy is 79.3 years.

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

The other three nodes were UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and SRI in California; Utah's link ran on a DEC PDP-10.

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?

Its shared root system covers 106 acres, and the same species became Utah's state tree in 2014.

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

It was also Utah's first national monument, proclaimed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.

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

The 1,500-foot coil of basalt and mud spent decades underwater; Smithson's wife Nancy Holt built Sun Tunnels in the same desert.

At its wartime peak, the Topaz internment camp ranked where among Utah's cities by population?

Some 9,000 Japanese Americans and staff lived in tar-paper barracks in the desert west of Delta from 1942 to 1945.

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

An F-4 Phantom released VX at too high an altitude and the wind carried it into Skull Valley; the Army did not admit fault until 1998.

What did Seraph Young do first among American women, in Salt Lake City on 14 February 1870?

Wyoming passed its suffrage law first, but Utah held two elections before any Wyoming woman reached a ballot box.

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

Angus Cannon was a polygamist with six wives; Martha was the fourth, and a physician with four degrees by age 25.

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

His last words, 'Let's do it', are said to have inspired Nike's 'Just Do It' slogan.

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

At least 120 emigrants died; only John D. Lee was ever convicted, and he was shot at the massacre site twenty years later.

Outlaw Butch Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker in 1866 in which Utah town?

He was the eldest of 13 children of English Mormon converts and grew up on a ranch near Circleville.

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

Bushnell also started Chuck E. Cheese, and a young Steve Jobs worked for him before Apple.

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

The Cougars remain the last team from outside a power conference to win a national title.

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

Goalkeeper Nick Rimando was man of the match in Seattle, and RSL had only sneaked into the playoffs on the final day.

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

Jazz owner Ryan Smith got the team in April 2024; it played its first season simply as Utah Hockey Club.

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

Alta's first chairlift in 1939 was built from a surplus mine tramway and cost 25 cents a ride.

How many world records fell at the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns during the 2002 Games?

At 4,675 feet the thin air offers little resistance, which is why the Oval is billed as the fastest ice on Earth.

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

He was so ill aboard Discovery that NASA jokingly named its space-sickness scale the 'Garn'.

Who became Utah's first, and so far only, female governor in 2003?

She stepped up from lieutenant governor when Mike Leavitt left to run the EPA, and her own party declined to nominate her in 2004.

After the 1857–58 Utah War, who replaced Brigham Young as territorial governor?

President Buchanan had sent 2,500 troops west; the settlement included a blanket pardon and an army camped 50 miles from Salt Lake City.

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

Its 38 phonetic letters were used to print a Book of Mormon, but the scheme was abandoned within two decades.

Which record does the Bear, flowing 350 miles into the Great Salt Lake, hold in North America?

It loops about 350 miles through Utah, Wyoming and Idaho before ending 90 miles from where it began.

Utah's Jordan River, which drains Utah Lake into the Great Salt Lake, was named for a river where?

Settlers saw a fresh lake draining into a dead salt sea and thought of the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea.

Which president established Bears Ears National Monument in December 2016?

Donald Trump cut it by 85 percent a year later and Biden restored the boundaries in 2021.

Where did Bill Clinton hold the 1996 ceremony proclaiming Utah's Escalante national monument?

Staging it outside the state, weeks before the election, enraged Utah politicians who had not been consulted.

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

Kenyon Roberts pitched the idea to lawmakers; the animal itself was named in 1993 from Grand County fossils.

Between Green River and which town does I-70 run 110 miles with no services, a US record?

The stretch through the San Rafael Swell was also the longest piece of new-route US highway built since the Alaska Highway.

Footloose (1984) shot its high-school and tractor-chicken scenes in and around which Utah town?

The fictional Bomont was set in Utah too; the flour mill in the film is the Lehi Roller Mills.

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

Fans still visit the school, although the story is set in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The cult horror film Troll 2, set in the town of 'Nilbog', was shot in 1989 in which Utah town?

Read Nilbog backwards; the town later hosted a 'Nilbog Invasion' fan event in 2007.

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

Sawyer Hemsley was still a Utah State student; the chain's rotating weekly menu became its signature.

Dixie State renamed itself what in 2022, dropping a word tied to its cotton-growing settlers?

The 'Dixie' label dated to the cotton-growing settlers of the 1860s and had become a source of controversy.

In 2018 the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square dropped which word from its former name?

The choir was founded in August 1847, barely a month after the pioneers arrived, and won a Grammy in the 1950s.

Who received the world's first permanent artificial heart, at the University of Utah in 1982?

The retired Seattle dentist lived 112 days on the Jarvik-7, implanted by William DeVries.

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

He sold the resort in 2020 but kept living there; the festival that bears its name started a decade after his purchase.

The 1950s causeway that splits the Great Salt Lake into two arms was built for which railroad?

Cut off from fresh water, the north arm turned pink with salt-loving microbes; a bridge opened in 2016 to let water flow again.

A 1909 inheritance tax on which railroad magnate's estate helped pay for Utah's State Capitol?

His widow wrote the state a cheque for $798,546 in 1911, and the building opened in 1916.

Gary Gabelich's 1970 land-speed record on Utah's salt flats came in a rocket car with what name?

Its 622 mph stood for 13 years and remains the last outright record set on the salt rather than in a desert.

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

The 80-mile waterless crossing cost them weeks, and they reached the Sierra Nevada just as the snows closed in.