Everybody knows the Utah highlight reel: Park City, Moab, St. George, Zion lines out the door. But the best places in this state are the ones nobody’s making documentaries about. So we asked the most Utah question there is: what’s the most underrated city in Utah?
Here are the contenders, and the cases for each.
Logan
Cache Valley is stupidly pretty, Utah State gives it a college town’s heartbeat, and it somehow stays off every tourist itinerary in the state. Aggie ice cream alone justifies the drive. The knock is the winter inversion; the defense is that everybody else has that too and worse rent.
Cedar City
Home of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, ten minutes from mountains in one direction and red rock in the other, and the gateway to Brian Head. It’s the rare Utah city that’s a basecamp for everything and crowded for nothing.
Price
The dinosaur capital nobody visits. The USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum is genuinely excellent, Nine Mile Canyon is in its backyard, and it’s the last real stop before the San Rafael Swell swallows you whole. Price isn’t on the way to anywhere, which is exactly the point.
Brigham City
Peach Days. A Main Street that looks like a movie set because it basically is one, the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge at its doorstep, and a small-town calm that the Wasatch Front lost somewhere around 2009.
Vernal
Dinosaurland, and proud of it. Dinosaur National Monument next door, Flaming Gorge up the road, and a main drag with a giant pink dinosaur watching over it. Vernal leans all the way into what it is, and that confidence is underrated by definition.
That’s our ballot — five cities, five fan bases about to be offended by the omissions. Kanab? Helper? Fillmore? Make your case.
Drop your pick in the comments: the most underrated city in Utah is ___.
Photo: A. E. Crane / U.S. Department of Transportation (NARA), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.