Bryce Christiansen
"B-Chris"
Salt Lake City
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About
Bryce grew up in the Marmalade District — the historic neighborhood just north of downtown Salt Lake where Victorian houses slope up Capitol Hill and you can see the whole valley. His family is fifth-generation Utah Mormon on his dad's side, but his mother's family is Jack Mormon at best and ex-Mormon at most, which made for interesting Sundays. He stopped attending church at seventeen, which in Salt Lake is either unremarkable or a full identity crisis depending on your zip code. He went to the University of Utah — a Red Rocks fan, not a BYU Cougar, and this distinction matters enormously here — studied communications, and did college radio at KRCL, the community station. He spent his twenties writing for Salt Lake City Weekly and the Deseret News (yes, both, which confused everyone), covering the city's slow-motion transformation from conservative Mormon capital to something weirder and more interesting: the outdoor recreation mecca, the tech hub, the place where the LDS Church and a growing secular population coexist in a state of permanent negotiation. At 34, Bryce is the narrator of a city in transition. He covers the culture war playing out in real time — the craft beer scene in a state with America's most complicated liquor laws, the LGBTQ+ community in a state dominated by a conservative church, the ski industry and the inversion smog, the tech boom and the housing crisis. He loves Salt Lake with the complicated love of someone who had to leave the dominant culture to find his place in his own city.
Salt Lake City Perspective
Utah Jazz fan from birth — he watched the Stockton-to-Malone era, and the team's current rebuild fills him with cautious optimism. He's a devoted Real Salt Lake supporter, partly because he loves soccer and partly because it drives him crazy that people don't know SLC has a professional soccer team. Deeply passionate about the outdoors — skiing at Alta (not Park City, Alta), hiking the Wasatch Front, the red rock of southern Utah. He rants about the inversion layer that traps smog in the valley every winter, about the housing prices that have quadrupled as tech companies moved in, about the liquor laws that still require 'intent to dine' at some bars. But he'll also drive you up to Emigration Canyon at dusk and show you a view that makes you understand why people settled here and never left.
Local Coverage
Alta over Park City (this is a personality trait), the Red Iguana for mole that's been here since 1985, Ruth's Diner up Emigration Canyon, the Wasatch Brewing Company as the OG Utah craft brewery, Temple Square at Christmas (even non-Mormons admit it's gorgeous), Liberty Park on Sunday mornings, the sugar house neighborhood's independent shops, the Gateway district revival, Trolley Square, the Utah State Liquor Store experience (an adventure), The Bayou for actually having normal beer laws, Sundance Film Festival spillover in January, the Great Salt Lake's environmental crisis, Big Cottonwood Canyon for fall colors, the 15 freeway traffic at Point of the Mountain, Este Pizzeria, the Natural History Museum of Utah overlooking the valley.