Heber City, UT
In the Heber Valley between the Wasatch and the Uinta Mountains, 17 miles southeast of Park City. Single 6,900ft runway 4/22, uncontrolled. Field elevation 5,637ft. The valley was settled by Mormon pioneers in 1859 and the historic Heber Valley Railroad still runs steam excursions from the depot in town. Park City and Deer Valley Resorts are the primary corporate-jet drivers — Sundance Film Festival traffic alone fills the ramp every January. Wasatch State Park and Jordanelle Reservoir are within 10 minutes of the field. Heber Valley is also a major glider center; Sundance Hot Air Balloon Festival uses the field as launch and recovery.
Deer Creek Reservoir, locally called Provo Reservoir, sits in a steep-walled valley between the Wasatch Range and the Heber Valley. The water is famously blue — glacial silt and the underlying bedrock combine for an almost Caribbean color on sunny days, a striking contrast to the brown Utah desert. Popular for sailing, water-skiing, and ice fishing. The dam at the south end (1941) is small but holds back a long, narrow lake that fills the valley between US-189 and the mountains. The flight from KHCR to KPVU passes directly over this reservoir — one of the most scenic short flights in Utah.
A high-end ski resort with a strict no-snowboards policy, immaculately groomed runs, and a reputation as one of the best-managed ski operations in the country. Hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics alpine events and is on the 2034 Olympics venue plan. Six interconnected mountains, 100+ runs, 21 chairlifts, and a base village (Silver Lake) that looks more like Swiss alpine than American resort. The Heber Valley flight in offers the best aerial perspective: you cross the Wasatch Range and Deer Valley appears as a tapestry of cleared runs on the east face, sharing terrain with Park City Mountain right next door.
Southwest of Salt Lake, on the east face of the Oquirrh Mountains, the ground is simply missing. Bingham Canyon is the largest man-made excavation on Earth: a copper pit two and a half miles across and three-quarters of a mile deep, terraced in concentric rings down to a floor you can barely make out from the rim. It has been worked since 1906, first as Utah Copper and now as Rio Tinto's Kennecott operation, and it has produced more copper than any mine in history; over 17 million tons. It is deep enough to stack two Empire State Buildings inside and wide enough to be plainly visible from orbit. Those stair-step benches are haul roads, sized for trucks with tires taller than a Cessna. It is a National Historic Landmark, an odd title for a hole, but there is nothing else like it.
On the remote north shore of the Great Salt Lake, at Rozel Point, a coil of black basalt 1,500 feet long curls out into the water; this is Spiral Jetty, the most famous piece of land art in the country, built by sculptor Robert Smithson in 1970 from 6,000 tons of rock and earth trucked to the spot. The whole point of it is that it is meant to be seen from above; on the ground it is just a low rock causeway, but from the air the spiral reads clean against the pink, salt-heavy water. It comes and goes with the lake. It sat submerged from 1972 until 2002, and drought has since left it high and dry, sometimes with a mile of cracked lakebed between it and the shore. Whether you see it at all depends on the year.