When longtime freelance travel writer Amber Gibson came to Salt Lake City a year ago to write an article for Fodor’s Travel, she already knew she’d be calling Utah’s capital the nation’s top mountain city.
“It was kind of how I pitched the whole (article),” Gibson, who’s from Chicago, said about the piece posted on the popular website last October titled, “Sorry, Denver. This is America’s Best Mountain City.”
Traveling full time for work has brought her to Denver “many times,” she said, describing Colorado as the place most international visitors think of first when they want to ski in the United States.
Salt Lake City, though, “is just as good, if not better, in a lot of respects,” Gibson said. Especially when it comes to how quickly travelers can be in the Wasatch Mountains after arriving at the Salt Lake City International Airport.
“I really appreciated how convenient it is to get from Salt Lake to the mountains,” she said. Her article put it this way: “Time is the ultimate currency when traveling, and a 10-minute ride from the airport to your hotel, then 40 minutes to ski resorts is priceless.”
Also highlighted was what’s available to visitors when they head back from the mountains to Salt Lake City, including new restaurants and bars, walkable neighborhoods, Olympic venues, a health and wellness culture, and increasing diversity.
“I think it introduced people to different sides of Salt Lake,” Gibson said, adding that her intent in bestowing the title of best “mountain city” on the area was “calling out something that I think people maybe weren’t seeing.”
‘We’ve got to jump on this’
The Fodor’s Travel article had a big impact on Visit Salt Lake, the private nonprofit largely funded by Salt Lake County to promote the capital city and surrounding area as a tourism and convention destination.
The convention and visitors bureau has long sought to overcome what Kaitlin Eskelson, Visit Salt Lake’s president and CEO, calls a “vanilla understanding” of a place that’s often confused with Denver, well established as the “mile-high city.”
“There’s so many times that we show a picture of Salt Lake, and people say, ‘Oh, that’s Denver.’ We know it’s not Denver,” Eskelson said, adding that surveys have repeatedly confirmed most people “don’t have an opinion one way or the other of Salt Lake.”
Then she saw the article declaring Denver had been dethroned.
“We were like, ‘Oh, man, we’ve got to jump on this,’ because they’ve named us the singular American mountain city in their article,” Eskelson said, deciding that even though Visit Salt Lake wasn’t looking for a new brand platform, “we’ve got to take advantage.”
Now the national rollout of a new brand staking a claim for Salt Lake City as “America’s Mountain City” is underway, the first time a permanent trademarked tagline has been added to the Visit Salt Lake name.
“Salt Lake is the only city in America where a world-class urban core exists inside a mountain range. The city and the mountain are the same experience. America’s Mountain City™ is how we make that impossible to ignore,” the branding materials explain.
Nearly 500 media outlets have already picked up on the new brand, Visit Salt Lake said.
Past promotional pitches emphasized amenities like downtown restaurants and bars that trip planners already took for granted were available in Salt Lake City, Eskelson said, using slogans that included “west of conventional” or “different by nature” over the years.
“Utahns generally are kind of understated,” she said. “For a long time, I think some of our marketing was trying to be apologetic, if you will, like, ‘Oh, well, we’re not those things.’ We were trying to dispel whatever we don’t want people to think of who we are.”
That’s changed, now that Salt Lake City and Utah are both “so hot. We’re really kind of stepping into our own. Honestly, we just needed an elevator pitch,” Eskelson said, something that sums up what makes it different.
“In Salt Lake, we’ve always known you don’t have to choose between the city and the mountains, that you can get both,” she said. “We’ve just never articulated that in a way that we could explain it to visitors.”
What Utah leaders say about ‘America’s Mountain City’
The new moniker was welcomed by Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson.
“I think it describes us perfectly. And not just the city, but the region. People think of Salt Lake City and they often don’t recognize that the city is relatively small in size, but our region is 1.2 million,” Wilson said.
What Salt Lake City has that is so special, she said, is ready access to the mountains, including to the four major ski resorts that are located within the county, in Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons.
“So the idea of ‘America’s Mountain City,’ I thought to myself, ‘Huh, who else can make that claim.’ There are a lot of American mountain towns that are exceptional,” Wilson said, but aren’t able to offer city amenities close to mountain activities.
“We tend to have had a little bit of a friendly rivalry with Colorado,” the county mayor said. “Denver and the Colorado mountains are exquisite. I don’t want to take anything away from them. But ours are exquisite and accessible.”
Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall is also supportive, her spokesman, Andrew Wittenberg, said.
Comparing the new brand to the Utah Department of Tourism’s “Life Elevated” slogan first introduced in 2006, Wittenberg said it “captures something essential about Salt Lake City: our deep connection to the surrounding mountains and the adventure they make possible.”
He said the mountains “are among our city’s most iconic features, but they also reflect the respect and responsibility we feel for our natural environment — something we’re proud to share with the world as we look toward 2034.”
That’s when a second Olympics and Paralympics is coming to Utah. But unlike in 2002, this time the official host of the Winter Games will be the state, not Salt Lake City. The privately funded organizing committee behind the $4 billion event is already using the name “Utah 2034.”
The name switch for the Winter Games wasn’t a consideration in the new Salt Lake City branding effort, Eskelson said.
“The Olympics will come and go and we will still be ‘America’s Mountain City,’” she said. “We’re still eight years out from the Games. This is us laying our brand platform. We’re going to use it and sell our assets.”
Of course, Salt Lake City isn’t Utah’s only destination for mountains. Park City, the state’s best-known ski area is less than a 45-minute drive from the Utah capital and bills itself as “Winter’s Favorite Town.”
Park City Mayor Ryan Dickey wasn’t aware that Visit Salt Lake had claimed the title of “America’s Mountain City,” but noted the high-elevation Summit County community is really a town rather than a city.
“There are a lot of things happening in the Salt Lake Valley,” Dickey said in a text accompanied by a smiling face with smiling eyes emoji, “and a great experience across our region only makes our mountain town in Park City an even more exceptional place to visit and live.”
