Walking the Salt Lake grid out of the fog

FOG hides the world map until your feet uncover it. Salt Lake City is a rare case where the layout makes total sense and the only real obstacle is distance.

The biggest blocks in America

Salt Lake City is built on a grid that starts at one corner of Temple Square and counts outward. Addresses are coordinates. Tell someone you are at 500 South 900 East and they know exactly where you are standing without looking it up. The blocks are 660 feet on a side, laid out wide enough to turn a wagon team, and the streets between them are correspondingly enormous.

Nothing here is confusing. It is just long. Four blocks is most of a kilometre. Crossing Main Street or State Street on foot takes real time, and a route that looks like a short hop on screen turns into a serious walk once you are on it. This is a city that rewards a plan and punishes improvisation less than it punishes optimism.

Uphill to the east

The valley floor is flat and the ground rises steadily east toward the Wasatch. The Avenues, north east of downtown, is the one district that breaks the pattern, with smaller blocks, older houses and a constant gentle climb. Above it are City Creek Canyon and Memory Grove, where paved road turns into canyon in about ten minutes of walking. Higher again is the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, running along the bench of the old lake with the entire grid laid out below you.

South of downtown the city flattens out again through Central Ninth, Liberty Wells and on to Sugar House, with Liberty Park sitting in the middle of it. Out west, the Jordan River Parkway runs north to south across the valley floor and gives you several kilometres of continuous path away from traffic.

An afternoon from Temple Square to Liberty Park

Try this one. Start at Temple Square, walk east on South Temple past the old mansions, turn up into the Avenues on 2nd Avenue, then drop down through Memory Grove and City Creek back into downtown. Head straight south on 200 East, cut east on 900 South through the 9th and 9th shops, and finish with a loop of Liberty Park. Eight or nine kilometres, one real climb, and it covers four parts of the city that feel nothing like each other.

Inversions, heat and how the map fills

Filling in Salt Lake City is unusually clean work. Because the blocks are so large there are fewer streets per square kilometre than in almost any other American city, so each street you walk claims a wide band of ground and your covered area grows fast. The trade is distance. There is a lot of asphalt between one intersection and the next, and a lattice that looks modest on screen is a long day on foot.

Season matters more here than in most places. January and February bring the inversion, when cold air settles in the valley and holds the smog under it for days at a time, and there are mornings when a long walk is simply a bad idea. Summer afternoons run past 38 degrees, dry but serious. Spring and autumn are close to perfect. The altitude, around 1,300 metres, will make itself known in your legs on the first climb into the Avenues, and again on the bench trail.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

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