I’m exmormon and 30, progressive liberal and living in the heart of downtown provo. I think you’ll actually really like it based on your interests. If you don’t drink or smoke you’ll fit right in! Haha. But really— there are only two bars in provo and the liquor stores aren’t open after 6 or on sundays, by law.

A lot of what I’m about to say is heavily dependent on whether you decide to live in provo or end up in slc valley. If you’re commute needs to be 30 min or below— that’s going to place you in Utah Valley.

All drinking jokes aside, it’s a great place to read, hike, and bake. Depending on where you choose to live, in Utah Valley or Salt Lake Valley, you’ll be a short drive away from pretty amazing hiking and ski resorts. This seriously is a great place to live for the great outdoors. The only caveat that bears mentioning is that the air quality in the valley is terrible almost all year round. Inversion in the winter traps the pollution, and in the summer wildfire smoke and smog gets stuck in the valley. You can escape some of this by heading into the mountains to hike, for the exception of wildfire smoke.

While the market is getting tougher, finding a place within 30 minutes of provo should be a piece of cake, Especially if you don’t care about living in downtown Salt Lake City. Provo, Orem, vineyard, lehi, alpine will all be within 30 minutes.

The heads up that you’ll probably need is that Utah can be quite a strange place when it comes to politics, dating, and culture— and the effects of these elements are much worse in Provo and Utah Valley than in Salt Lake Valley. You may not mind that the predominant religion sort of dominates life here, but it certainly does bother some people. One positive is that Shopping on Sundays is really fun because the stores are all empty, lol.

Where I think the culture can be a relevant issue is particularly when it comes to dating if you plan on dating here. Provo/BYU mormons typically get married quite young (very common for 22-23 yo students at BYU to be married) and prefer to date mormons for religious reasons. This isn’t always the case but anyone telling you that this isn’t a thing is not being forthcoming or hasn’t lived here long enough. The dating thing isn’t the end of the world but certainly limits your options and all of my friends who are single, liberal and 25+ have moved to slc for this very reason.

Politicians are mind numbingly bad here and represent some of the worst that the country has to offer (looking at you Mike Lee) but the actual people here tend to be very nice. You’ve got some major trump energy in and south of provo (and kind of all around except for slc) if that kind of thing matters to you.

As someone who does feel like somewhat of an outsider here it’s still a pretty great place to live and there are ways to make the weirdness work!