Salt Lake City

A recent work trip provided the opportunity to see a part of the US I'd never visited before - Utah. Salt Lake City was, of course, founded by Mormon pioneers and the influence of the church still runs deep today.

It's a picturesque part of the US, and reminded me a lot of some Australian towns. If you took downtown Melbourne and bits of Toowoomba's for the suburbs, perhaps. These cities were all founded in the mid 19th century, and have European-style architecture transplanted into a dry, brown landscape. Salt Lake City even has trams like Melbourne!

It was a good, but short trip. The weather was perfect, albeit a bit too cold for not having brought a sweater, and I even had a morning off to explore and take a few photos. The season was turning sooner than Austin, and some of the leaves were already a beautiful bright red.

I ventured down to Temple Square, where I didn't have the heart to tell the very young missionaries that their efforts were wasted on me. The office building was easily three times bigger than the temple, which says a lot about religion in general I guess. This office building is the subject of the lead picture for this post.

The best light was for sunset on our first night there. While my boss drove his rental I managed get a couple of rushed sunset shots out the windscreen of the car. If you zoom in on this one you'll even see a plane coming in to land.

My boss and I managed to squeeze in a drive up the hills to Park City, a very expensive tourist town where Sundance is held every year. I missed the light, but managed to get a nice shot of some delicious candy apples before heading to dinner.