S A L T   L A K E   C I T Y

You never have to wonder which way you are facing. The Wasatch stands along the whole eastern edge of the city, close enough that you read the weather off it from a kitchen window, and the old grid runs square to it. Brigham Young set the origin at Temple Square three days after the wagons arrived, laid the streets to the compass, and made them a hundred and thirty-two feet wide — the width, so the story goes, needed to turn an ox team without resorting to profanity. So the numbered streets are not names, they are distances: every one of them tells you how far north, south, east or west of the Temple you are standing. You do not learn this city, you read it, and within a week you can price any walk in your head before you take it.

The mountain stays close. The Bonneville Shoreline Trail runs thirteen and a half miles inside the city limits along the old lake bench, threaded above the streets, and from the northern neighbourhoods you reach it on foot. Millcreek Canyon is eight and a half miles from downtown. Big Cottonwood is thirty-five minutes. Somewhere else that would be a weekend; here it is a decision you make at six on a Wednesday, and what settles it is not logistics but whether you feel like going.

West of the grid the ground opens out for thirty miles to the Oquirrhs and the lake, so the evenings end in an absurd amount of sky. It is a strange and good combination — a mountain wall at your back and a horizon in front of you that goes on until it stops being land.

January is not July with snow. In the cold months the air on the valley floor settles and a lid of warmer air closes over it, and everything the city breathes out stays where it is. There was a morning when it was four degrees at the airport under smog and, half a mile higher, sunlit and forty-five. That is the winter bargain in a sentence. On the bad weeks the valley is the thing you leave and the mountain is where you go to breathe, and driving up stops being recreation. The storms that break an inversion are the same storms that make the snow the state puts on its licence plates.

Spring runs two seasons at once: the valley greening and warming while the canyons are still buried and the creeks come down loud, so that twenty minutes of driving buys you a different month. Summer is dry and high-nineties hot, the kind of heat that empties the middle of the day and hands the evening back — you water before breakfast, you go out at eight, and a mature street tree stops being scenery and starts being infrastructure. Then autumn works downhill: aspen gold up high from late September, the maples turning the benches red through early October, the big city trees holding out until nearly November. A cold snap can strip a ridge in two days, so you go when it happens rather than when you meant to.

That is the life. The question is where inside it to live, and Sugar House finished first, ahead of Yalecrest and Lower Avenues.

Not the Sugar House of the towers and the parking lots at 2100 South. The one we mean is the northeastern part of the neighbourhood, up above the commercial district around the crossing everyone calls 15th and 15th — quiet gridded streets, older houses, big trees, far enough from the arterials that the arterials are not part of your day.

East High's track is about a mile away. Close enough to jog there, do the work, and jog home, which is the difference between a habit and a project, especially in February.

A short walk the other way is Wasatch Hollow: eleven acres along half a mile of Emigration Creek, a spring-fed pond, two loops that together come to just under a mile. It is not landscaping. It is a remnant of the Emigration Creek corridor, kept as natural ground inside an ordinary residential neighbourhood. You can fold it into a walk you were taking anyway. Nature stops being an outing and becomes a stretch of the way home.

And the walking is better than the wider neighbourhood might suggest. Sugar House at large has the width of 2100 South, the interstate along the bottom, the big retail blocks laid out for cars. From up here almost none of that reaches you. You go north to the track, east to the creek, or nowhere in particular, and it is houses and trees the whole way.

The bargain is that the good streets are not the useful ones. Down in the busier part of Sugar House are the places that make a week's shopping feel like home — Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, the bigger stores around 2100 South. They are not around the corner from these blocks. They are the bicycle part of the week, or the car part. What you buy with that inconvenience is the quiet, the creek and the track, and some weeks the trade feels obvious and some weeks it feels like an errand.

Downtown is close enough to use and far enough that you check the bus before you put your shoes on. A direct bus runs a few blocks west, but not so often that you forget the timetable. It works. It just is not something you walk out into.

Then there is the heat in August, and the weeks in January when the air itself is the reason to go up or stay in.

Yalecrest would make the week quieter. The streets are calmer, the track is easy from nearly anywhere in it, Harmons is close, with a pharmacy beside it, and there is real ground inside the neighbourhood rather than at its edge. If Sugar House is the more useful place, Yalecrest is the more composed one, and on a different Tuesday it would win.

Lower Avenues puts downtown under your feet, the cathedral at the bottom of the hill and City Creek at the top of the street. Almost everything you need is a fine-grained walk. What it cannot give you is the track — for that you would have to leave the neighbourhood, and every extra journey gives the habit another chance to disappear.

The mountains would be there from any of them. That is what nobody has to earn in this city: the range is east, the canyons are twenty minutes, and the light comes off the Wasatch into every kitchen on the bench. What a neighbourhood decides is smaller and more daily than that — whether the track is a jog or a drive, whether the creek is on your way or off it, how much of Saturday the groceries take. The northeastern corner of Sugar House is where those come out right, and the mountains need no help from the address.