The Utah State Capitol sits on a sandstone bench a hundred feet above the rest of downtown Salt Lake City. The site was chosen for the view. It also turns out to be a useful piece of geometry on a hot afternoon — the slope means the descent is shaded by the bluff’s own east-facing shadow until about 4 PM, and the canopy at Memorial Grove (the city’s war-memorial park in City Creek Canyon) extends that cover almost all the way down to South Temple.
The picks below are afternoon walks, all routed downhill. State Street itself is the shadier of the two main spines south — the sycamores along the central median plus the building shadows on the east side make for a continuous afternoon walk. The Main Street alternative loses the canopy after the City Creek shopping center. A practical note: the descent is steep enough that the time labels under-report — these walks read longer than the same distance on a flat city.