Wasatch Range

... um, was on the East Coast in the big city, which I was really excited about as kind of a change of pace.

I grew up in Utah, close to the Wasatch Mountains.

And after five years of being inside a lab and in a big city, I definitely, um, had become-

Craving.

Farther down, its walls are rugged and angular, being composed of limestones.

The principal tributaries from the south are the Blue, which heads in Mount Lincoln, and the Gunnison, which heads in the Wasatch Mountains.

These streams are also characterized by deep canyons and plateaus, and mesas abound on every hand.

Between the Grand River and the White River, farther to the east, the Tavaputs Plateau is found.

The Uinta Range stands across the course of Green River, which finds its way through it by a series of stupendous canyons.

The range has an east and west trend.

The Wasatch Mountains, a long north-south range here, divide the plateau province from what is known among geologists as the Basin Range Province on the west.

The latter is the great interior basin whose waters run into salt lakes and sinks, there being no drainage to the sea.

But, you know, that's one of the consequences of the Great Salt Lake dying.

And, you know, and that too, though, you know, that area is so different from like the Wasatch Front.

It's one of the only places that you could go sailing and skiing on the same day.

And Then hop in the car the next day and drive down to southern Utah and you get a whole different red rock country.

Um, but I think not everybody has that budget to go do that, or maybe it's not happening right now and it'll happen next year in five years.

But I think we can all kind of look at travel in a different way and go and in our own neighborhoods, or we look at things in our own town.

Because I can tell you what, I've lived in Salt Lake most of my life, you know, along the Wasatch Front there, and there's still tons of stuff I haven't seen.

And so when you look at it from, you know, like a staycation perspective, you're seeing things or that you, that you maybe haven't seen before.

Let us move now from the East River to the mountains of Utah, from a place that holds the history of disease and confinement to a place that holds something far older and far more intimate, names, the names of the dead, billions of them.

You are in Little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Range, roughly 30 kilometres southeast of Salt Lake City.

The canyon is steep and narrow, its walls composed of pale granite, a light-coloured intrusive igneous rock that is quarried here in the 19th century, for use in the construction of the Salt Lake Temple.

The granite is hard, dense and remarkably stable.

They are highly trained members of mountain rescue teams, and their ability to locate humans sent beneath snow can provide rescuers with a critical advantage when time is running out.

Wasatch Backcountry Rescue, the organization supporting professional mountain rescue throughout the Wasatch, says its primary purpose is rapid response to avalanche rescue, winter mountain rescue, and medical evacuation incidents using trained professionals and searching rescue dogs.

The numbers show just how extensive this rescue network is.

Wasatch Backcountry Rescue currently has more than 200 professional members and 45 certified rescue dogs responding for five county sheriff's agencies covering Salt Lake, Summit, Weber, Wasatch, and Utah counties.

Deer Valley and Park City Mountain are among the organizations that make up UBR.

These dogs undergo some serious training.

But there is a sobering reason this training matters so much.

When someone is buried in an avalanche, time is critical.