These Olympics will be the first I’ve ever really identified with. The country in and around Salt Lake City is home country for me, even though I was neither a skier nor a skater. I was born in Utah, was brought up in an Idaho town just across the state line, went to Utah State and worked there and taught there, lived and worked in Salt Lake City, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Ogden and up Ogden Canyon, which is home country for my wife.

But I join some of my Utah relatives and friends in not being happy with what the big operators have done to Salt Lake City. Their city, and ours. For several years we’ve tried to avoid driving into the downtown area, and even the interstates are a mess. From the rooftop restaurant in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (which we knew as the Hotel Utah) we could look out and see the miserable orange-and-white barrels. Salt Lake had to be redone for the Olympics. Even the beautiful Temple Square area had to be altered.

Altered for the visitors and the tourists. Salt Lake City is no longer the mainly Mormon town it used to be, and problems have arisen. There’s much more crime. The city can be hellish to drive in. Folks from outside, many of whom have habits not in accord with the Mormon Word of Wisdom, may encounter liquor-and-tobacco problems. I must, however, take issue with the old story I heard from many visitors to our “Zion.” You could always buy cigarettes and booze in the city Brigham Young and his people founded in 1847.

One thing you can’t beat in the Salt Lake area is the mountains. They’re not as high as the high peaks in Colorado, but they’re way up there. And the Utah people we’re in touch with tell us the snow is plentiful. The resorts in the area are plentiful, too, and places like Park City are enjoyable to see, and if you’re out there and the weather is friendly, you should drive up to see that huge copper pit in what we used to call Bingham Canyon.

It can be mighty cold around and in Salt Lake, but I’ve been reading the weather tables daily and see that even though it snows, there’ll be days for thawing. Maybe. It can be rough driving around there, but I trust that the city fathers and mothers will keep the streets and highways clear.

In some years I remember that would have been a hard thing to accomplish. I worked on the Deseret News in 1948 and 1949, the time of the big snows and blizzards. From November to March, the streets were packed with snow. We had no garage, and I’d go out in the morning to try to start that antiquated Hudson. Some days it wouldn’t start, so I’d go through the high snow to 33rd South and try to hitch a ride to downtown Salt Lake City. Our home was in the foothills, just a few miles from the East Mill Creek Canyon we so enjoyed.

When we could get the car going to get to the News and get my wife to her job at the University of Utah, we’d settle the car into the ruts on 13th East and try to move along. I kept a shovel in the trunk. One day I got stuck three times in the heavy snow in the unshoveled parking lots at the university.

Salt Lake City, when it’s not foggy or smoggy (smog can be pretty gross there) is a truly beautiful city. We loved to look down into the town or up to the lofty state capitol. Most of the streets are wide, and many are mighty hilly. The capitol is lovely in its high setting, and Temple Square, at least in the summer, can be a magnificent sight. You of course know about the fabled Tabernacle, where the choir performs (though maybe it performs now in the new Conference Center nearby).

Tall buildings and hotels (for Olympics visitors) now obscure some of the sights we once enjoyed. When I worked on the Salt Lake Tribune and later on the News, I was close to the historic areas, near that big statue of Brigham Young in an intersection, near the monument to the seagulls who once saved the crops. (I read recently that the seagulls actually came in to feed on the crickets every year, but let’s leave the legend alone.)

And the mountains. I hope visitors get to see Ogden, which is the city where I’d live if I chose to return to Utah. The mountains are truly a thing to behold there. We have two nieces who live almost at the foot of the one called Ben Lomond. There’ll be skiing up Ogden Canyon, I understand. And a big ice skating rink is in Kearns, about two blocks from the home of my brother Neal.

Calder Pickett is a professor emeritus of journalism at Kansas University. His column appears Sundays in the Journal-World.