Utah has always known its angles. From Thelma & Louise to High School Musical, it has long played Hollywood’s dreamscape, a supporting act with main-character energy. Now, with The Bachelorette heading west, the spotlight turns to the state itself. Soon, Utah’s canyons, slopes and dark-sky deserts will frame prime-time romance, and Utah will be the one winning hearts.
It began, as so many modern fascinations do, on a screen. The wildly viral Secret Lives of Mormon Wives introduced the world to Taylor Frankie Paul, the Mormon mum turned global fixation, and brought Utah’s suburban lawns and pastel cul-de-sacs to a global audience. Now, with Paul cast as the next Bachelorette, Utah isn’t merely the backdrop. It’s the story.
Where illusion meets elevation
Utah doesn’t need a filter. It sells itself in red cliffs and powder-white peaks, in skies so clear you feel like you can practically touch the stars. On reality TV, Utah is the lens that brings truth into focus. The landscape needs no filter to tell a love story. Here, the light speaks for itself.
“Thirty per cent of international visitors come to Utah because they’ve seen it on screen,” says Natalie Randall, Managing Director of the Utah Office of Tourism and Film.
“Film has always been part of who we are.”
Utah’s cinematic legacy is now mapped through the new Utah Film Trail, which guides travellers to more than 35 iconic filming locations from Butch Cassidy to Thelma & Louise and Forrest Gump. “It’s like a genre sampler,” Randall says.
“Visitors can trace their own Western, road movie or sci-fi adventure all in one state.”
A deeper love
But even the best cinematography can’t catch what lies outside the frame. Randall calls it hózhó, a Diné (Navajo) word that holds harmony between people and the natural world.
“It’s impossible to translate into a single English word,” she explains. “It’s a living state of balance, beauty and connection.”
Visitors can glimpse it through Indigenous-led operators such as Ancient Wayves, who interpret petroglyphs, cliff dwellings and desert flora through multigenerational knowledge. In Monument Valley, Navajo guides from Simpson’s Trailhandler Tours lead travellers through sandstone cathedrals before sharing frybread and blue corn pancakes under dark skies.
And when the set lights go out, the sky still performs. The edit fades, but hózhó remains.
Airport to powder
Touch down in Salt Lake City and look east. The Wasatch Range fills the window. From the airport, twelve of Utah’s fifteen ski resorts are within an hour’s drive, close enough to turn powder mornings into date-night TV gold.
Corey Marshall, Utah’s representative Down Under, grew up skiing the Canadian Rockies but still concedes the title.
“Everyone asks about my best snow day,” he says. “I have three: Powder Mountain, Utah. Snowbird, Utah. And a third one in Canada, but only because we got a storm.”
The state’s claim of the Greatest Snow on Earth isn’t marketing bravado. It’s meteorology, a dry, crystalline “lake effect” that creates that effortless, weightless suspension skiers chase and producers adore.
The sound of love
The best love stories have a soundtrack. In Utah, love has a score you can stand inside.
When Randall talks about music, she skips Post Malone, the state’s famous resident, and goes straight to the Moab Music Festival, where music isn’t restricted to inside. “It’s otherworldly,” she says of violins echoing off canyon walls.
At Salt Lake City Airport, the River Tunnel hums with Ute, Navajo and Paiute compositions, greeting travellers with quiet rhythm. “Harmony isn’t silence,” Randall says. “It’s the mix.”
If the state’s five national parks formed a band, she jokes, “Zion would be the lead singer, Arches the guitarist, Bryce the bass, Canyonlands the drummer, and Capitol Reef the multi-instrumentalist full of surprises.”
Utah Forever
Utah doesn’t rush intimacy. It reveals itself slowly, layer by layer: red rock, snow, shadow, silence. Bryce Canyon glows rose at dawn, Arches turns gold at dusk, and Ulum Moab’s tented suites open onto 150 million years of sandstone and sky. Along Scenic Byway 12, Airstreams, Conestoga wagons and glass domes transform nights into galaxies.
But loving a place means making it last. Randall says the Utah Forever initiative aims to do just that. “It’s not a campaign,” she says. “It’s a framework to make sure what visitors experience is what we promise them.”
It’s a promise that rests again on hózhó, a love that sustains what it touches.
When love lifts the ceiling
Marshall remembers a moment in Moab, mountain biking with his wife Karen along the Slickrock trail. “We were out with a local guide and we get to this section and it’s like a big 45 degree rockface and the guide said, ‘You’ve just got to trust it’. The guide went first and showed Karen how to do it because you’ve got to make sure you don’t clip your inside pedal. Karen gets it done and she’s stoked.
“I told her she really pushed her boundaries, but the guide corrected me. She hadn’t pushed her limits, she’d lifted her ceiling.
“That’s what Utah does. It lifts you up.”
That’s the promise of The Bachelorette’s Utah season, that love, stripped of performance, might rediscover its altitude. In a world chasing content, connection still belongs to the land. That’s Utah. Life, elevated.
This article is brought to you by Visit Utah.
