Editor's Note: For the next week, Lee Benson's office is his bicycle as he travels the byways and backways of northern Utah, looking for columns.
OGDEN VALLEY — If there's one place in the Beehive State that might be excused for going all pious on us, for acquiring a holier-than-thou attitude, it's gotta be this place.
Nestled between majestic mountain peaks keeping watch like so many Roman sentinels, the Ogden Valley has movie-star good looks. You'd swear Norman Rockwell painted it. It's as incapable of looking bad as Salma Hayek. It makes everywhere else look lone and dreary.
And don't think the people who live here, all 6,000 of them, don't know it. The verdant valley's centerpiece town is named Eden.
The Mormon pioneers who came in 1859 to farm the land and follow their bliss racked their brains and couldn't think of a better fit.
Eden sits between the equally small, equally charming towns of Liberty and Huntsville. These villages are surrounded by farms, ranches, horse pastures, Snowbasin, Powder Mountain and Wolf Creek Utah ski resorts, the occasional top-rate golf courses — and right in the middle there's a picture-perfect lake: Pineview Reservoir.
All this is overlooked by Monte Cristo (The Mount of Christ).
Is it any wonder the valley's two biggest tourist attractions are spiritual in nature?
Each is located east of Eden.
On 7600 South in Huntsville, the family home of David O. McKay, the enormously popular president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1951 until his death in 1970, attracts visitors on Saturdays throughout the summer months. Family members who maintain the old homestead personally conduct guided tours free of charge.
Wendy McKay, a clan member who lives next door, said between 20 and 100 visitors stop by every Saturday.
"Whole tour groups come by. The tour buses park right out front," she said. "It's still way popular."
Not far away, in the foothills above Huntsville, sits the Abbey of the Holy Trinity, a Catholic monastery established in 1947 by Trappist monks from Kentucky, who took one look at the Utah hillside and saw a slice of heaven.
The monks are cloistered on 1,800 acres, 700 of which are cultivated. They used to farm the land themselves, but the 16 monks in residence are getting up there — none will see his 60th birthday again — and there hasn't been a newcomer who has stuck it out in 30 years.
So these days they rent out the land to local farmers, although they still sell honey and jams and jellies in the abbey store, alongside Catholic books and custom-built wooden boxes made by Brother Nicholas.
Brother Leander was working the store the day I pedaled up. He explained that the Trappist order adheres strictly to the rule of St. Benedict, who stressed stability. And what better place for that?
Hence, the 16 monks don't venture out much, but they are very well known to one another, Brother Leander affirmed. "Oh, yes. Even from the way they're walking, you know who they are," he said.
The valley's soberness, if you will, is counterbalanced by the Shooting Star Saloon in Huntsville, the oldest continually operated bar in Utah (since 1879). It's located just around the corner from the McKay house, where, among other things, you can purchase what has been regarded by more than one connoisseur as the finest cheeseburger in Utah.
I couldn't leave the valley without visiting a garden.
I stopped at the small homestead where Chris and Sandy Hogge are raising their three children. It's located just a block from the "Welcome to Eden" sign at the Eden City Park.
There are comfortable chairs on the porch, a basketball hoop in the driveway by the barn, and in the front yard they grow corn, tomatoes, beans, peas and squash.
"So is this the garden of Eden?" I asked Sandy, wondering how many times the locals have heard that line.
But she didn't look annoyed. Instead she motioned across the street and said, "Oh, there's a lot better one on the corner."
I asked if it's easy growing stuff in Eden.
"Well, we do have a shorter growing season," she said. "Sometimes we have to cover the plants at night, although we haven't had a frost yet this year."
I mentioned that she and her husband sure did pick a heavenly little valley to live in.
"Yeah," said Sandy, "the joke is we're just over the hill from Paradise."
That would be Paradise, Utah, located on the other side of the mountain going toward Logan.
It turns out I'm heading there next. From Eden to Paradise. I'll let you know how that turns out.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com