this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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Lived in both. Utah is the theocratic Bible Belt the South can only dream of.
That said, Utah--particularly the Salt Lake City area--isn't as bad as you'd expect if you're not Mormon. Yes , the influence is there, but there's a surprising number of fun things to do that have nothing to do with them, even some really good craft breweries (whose beer is exempt from the state's weird alcohol content limits). I'd much sooner go back to Utah than any Southern state.
I’ve never been to the south, but driving from Vegas to SLC on I15 shows how beautiful the mountains are in Utah, and how ugly the cities are. Just miles and miles of suburbs covered in billboards. I’m from the Pacific Northwest and you really only see billboards from the freeway when you drive through Indian reservations, and it makes me really sensitive to them when I travel.
I had some fun in SLC, barring all their esoteric alcohol laws
You speak the truth. Over a decade in the south and over a decade in Utah, Utah is MILES better by comparison in just about every single metric.
Except during an inversion.
What's an inversion, in this context?
Salt Lake City exists in a big bowl surrounded by a bunch of mountains. When the seasons change, the changing temperature traps some air in the bowl. I don't know the specifics behind it, but what you end up with is thick nasty smog that hangs over the entire city in a gross haze for days to weeks at a time.
I'm not native to Utah but I spent a little over a year there for school, and I got to experience the inversion. Looking out from the balcony on my apartment in broad daylight, I was unable to see the street. It just faded out into nasty brown fog like Silent Hill but grosser. People were wearing masks if they needed to go outside.
Yeah, it got pretty bad some days. Thankfully a good snowfall was enough to clear it up.
Oh gross, yeah I'll pass
It's gotten worse as well, the lake is drying up and spreading arsenic in the air too.
https://deq.utah.gov/daq/inversions
Basically what skulblaka said. The air quality is normally not bad in terms of urban influence but when the inversion hits it creates a bubble which basically traps it all in the Salt Lake valley until the temperature changes or a strong enough wind comes in to "pop" the bubble.