Salt Lake City: Livability in the 21st Century

“In other cities people take two hours to get to work,”
says Carl Fisher, Save Our Canyons executive director.
“Drive two hours from Salt Lake—or even just 30
minutes—and you can be in the middle of nowhere.”
Born and raised along the Wasatch Mountain foothills,
Fisher began volunteering with Save Our Canyons—a halfcentury-old
Salt Lake City-based non-profit organization
dedicated to “protecting the beauty and wildness of the
Wasatch canyons, mountains, and foothills”—in 2001.
Since then Fisher has emerged as one of the most vocal
proponents for protecting the wilderness just beyond Salt
Lake City’s borders, not only in terms of the environment,
but in the name of recreationalists and drinking water
quality as well. “Cities and counties have been fairly
receptive to conservation. It’s those at the state and
federal level, removed from what we have right here, that
are a little tougher to convince,” Fisher says. Save Our
Canyons achievements include designation of the Lone Peak
Wilderness Area in 1978, followed by the Twin Peaks and
Mount Olympus designations in 1984 and most recently,
maintaining public attention for the Wasatch Wilderness
and Watershed Protection Act.
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Carl Fisher, Save Our Canyons
executive director.
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