Utah Trivia & Tidbits - Page 13

Looking for Utah trivia? Try our list Utah little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Utah’s highest point is Kings Peak, in the Uinta Mountains, at 13,528 feet. Its lowest point is at Beaver Dam Wash, at 2,350 feet, near St. George.

first appeared: 2/9/2003

Utah’s state song, Utah We Love Thee, adopted in 1937, extols the state’s virtues—its mountains, sunny skies, and pioneers. It also predicts Utah’s prosperous future and tells of its citizens’ great love for their home state.

first appeared: 2/2/2003

Utah took its name from the Ute Indian tribe. The word means “people of the mountains.”

first appeared: 2/2/2003

Utah adopted “Industry” as its state motto on March 4, 1959. The term is symbolic of early pioneers who relied on their own sense of industry to survive, because so few resources were initially available to them. The word “industry” appears on both the state seal and the state flag.

first appeared: 1/26/2003

The sego lily is Utah’s official flower, chosen because it once helped save the lives of the early settlers. Between 1840 and 1851, food sources became so scarce due to crop-devouring insects that settlers learned to cook and eat the roots of the sego lily. The flower earned its status March 18, 1911, after the state’s schoolchildren chose it in a census.

first appeared: 1/19/2003

The students at Millville Elementary School in Millville (pop. 1,507) helped establish the cherry as the state fruit in 1997. They compiled basic information about Utah’s cherry industry for the state Legislature and found that the fruit generated an average $5.5 million in sales each year, beating out the other candidates, the apple and peach.

first appeared: 1/12/2003

Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park features several hoodoos—strangely shaped pillars that sometime resemble human forms. The pillars, shaped by centuries of water and wind erosion, were called “Legend People” by the Paiute Indians, who once lived in the region.

first appeared: 1/5/2003

Utah chose the California seagull as its official bird in 1955. The reasoning dates back to the mid-1800s, when settlers were plagued by hordes of crickets devouring their crops. An unexpected ally, the gull, descended in droves on the insects and devoured them before all crops were lost.

first appeared: 1/5/2003

Built in 1882, Moore’s Old Pine Inn in Marysvale (pop. 381)—once the Pines Hotel—is Utah’s oldest hotel. Copies of The New York Times from 1882 are still glued to the rafters (for an unknown reason). Writer Zane Grey and outlaw Butch Cassidy both stayed there.

first appeared: 12/29/2002

The lowest temperature ever recorded in Utah was 69 degrees below zero on Feb. 1, 1985, at Peter’s Sink in Cache County.

first appeared: 12/22/2002

Several cities in Utah have celebrated Pioneer Day annually for more than 150 years in honor of their ancestors, 70,000 of whom followed Mormon prophet Brigham Young in a journey westward that began in 1847. They traveled 1,300 miles in search of a new home and religious freedom and finally arrived in the Salt Lake Basin. It’s been called the greatest human migration in American history.

first appeared: 12/15/2002

Utah is home to what’s widely considered America’s first department store. Zions Co-operative Mercantile Institution was established in 1868 in Salt Lake City and since has opened several stores throughout the region. The original is still open today, though it merged with May Department Stores in 1999.

first appeared: 12/8/2002

The Utah Museum of Natural History, at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, holds a collection of 250 leather moccasins and moccasin fragments excavated from Promontory Cave in the 1930s. The moccasins have been dated to between A.D. 1100 and 1600.

first appeared: 12/1/2002

The Bear River is the longest stream in the Western Hemisphere that does not empty into an ocean. The river starts in Utah, flows into Wyoming, back into Utah, into Wyoming again, into Idaho, and finally into Utah’s Great Salt Lake—a course covering about 500 miles.

first appeared: 11/24/2002

Utah’s rugged and remote Henry Mountains, in the southeastern part of the state, went unexplored long after other ranges in the West had been surveyed and mapped. During a trip to the area in 1869, geologist John Wesley Powell called the range the Unknown Mountains, before re-naming them after friend and Smithsonian Institution secretary Joseph Henry in 1871. Four years later, geologist Grove Karl Gilbert began an exhaustive study of the Henrys for the U.S. Geological Survey.

first appeared: 11/17/2002

Speaking of trees, “Metaphor: The Tree of Utah”—an 87-foot tall colorful abstract sculpture of a tree standing starkly on the Bonneville Salt Flats alongside I-80 west of Wendover (pop. 1,537)—was created in the early 1980s by European artist Karl Momen. Several large, semi-spherical, fallen “leaves” intentionally lie scattered on the ground near the tree’s base.

first appeared: 11/10/2002

Maud May Babcock (1867-1954) founded the departments of speech and physical education at the University of Utah and was the state’s first lady of theater, producing more than 300 plays in her lifetime.

first appeared: 11/3/2002

The 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah has three geographical sections: The Grand Staircase, a series of terraces and multicolored cliffs; the Kaiparowits Plateau, an 800,000-acre area of jagged cliffs and rugged canyons; and the Canyons of the Escalante, which feature Navajo Sandstone, known as slickrock, plus many deep canyons, natural bridges, and stone arches.

first appeared: 10/27/2002

Rainbow Bridge in southern Utah, the world’s largest natural bridge, is 290 feet tall—nearly the height of the Statue of Liberty. President William Howard Taft declared it a national monument in 1910, saying it looked “much like a rainbow,” and the site today is visited by 300,000 people a year. It is sacred to American Indians.

first appeared: 10/20/2002

The Parowan Gap Petroglyphs carved in boulders near Parowan (pop. 2,565) are mysterious reminders of the Parowan Fremont people—early inhabitants of the area who inscribed the prehistoric markings. The petroglyphs are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

first appeared: 10/13/2002

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