Utah.

“You see those houses up there? Yeah, the ones on the ridgeline. The average cost of those places is about $7 million, and they’re occupied between two and three weeks a year.”

Our van fell silent for a moment. I had finished working at one of the local ski resorts here in Utah, and was riding in the back of a shared employee transport van down Old Highway 40 towards Heber City. The man who had spoken was a senior ski resort employee, and his words echoed inside my mind while I stared up at the snow-covered crest of the roadside mountain.

Prior to reaching this fortress of powder skiing and steadfast wealth, I stopped briefly in San Francisco CA, to visit a friend and help establish myself in the country. I was impressed with the scale, diversity and distinctiveness of San Francisco’s individual neighbourhoods, from the wild and wacky Castro District, to the undulating streets of Hayes Valley, across to the Financial and Tech districts in the CBD.

What struck me the most, what I’m sure has struck many before me and which will I’m equally sure will strike many more to come, was the stark and unforgiving depiction of San Francisco’s incredible issue of homelessness, most graphically present in the Tenderloin district, 6th and 7th Streets in particular. This area was among my first visited in the city – somewhat ironically while on my way down Market Street during Black Friday, heading towards the Westfield Centre. As the sleepy suburban streets turned into beaten down shopfronts, I became increasingly aware of the changing demographic, shifting as gradually as the changing building types themselves. Walking alone, painfully aware of how out of place I felt, I passed by San Francisco’s down-and-out, the huddled masses who Lady Liberty had turned her back on, casting her light elsewhere. It was a profoundly unnerving experience, drowning my hunger for exploration in a tidal wave of shame and guilty anguish.

When I arrived in Utah, I circled around Salt Lake City in a warm airport transfer van, accompanied by a friendly driver who regaled me with his own stories of skiing in the nearby canyons. As a result, I completely circumvented Salt Lake City – which I was to learn later grapples with its own issues of homelessness and drug abuse – and arrived in a place where these issues simply do not exist; a place where the harsh and ugly truths about America’s rising income inequality and widening wealth gap are merely stories masquerading as background noise within establishments where people pay no heed.

I’m writing this while sitting in the Summit County Library, perched behind a clean, wooden-veneered desk and gazing out at what I believe is the nearby Wasatch range, about 40 minutes East of Salt Lake City. The overcast conditions do little to dampen the breathtaking beauty of the mountains, painted haphazardly with a brilliant white snowmass underneath the patchy dark green and brown clumps of forest. They promise a land of adventure, of crisp powder lying dormant beneath a cool, crisp canopy that promises to do harm upon the sunlight that would enter through the branches.

Such a landscape threatens to shield those in the surrounding valleys from what lies on the other side – a state and further a nation in desperate need of reform, a wealthy nation nonetheless in need of basic provisions for the welfare of the most vulnerable. What poses itself as an escape from the rigours of city life in the process cannot avoid from revealing itself as a place where this country’s greatest failings are nothing more than anecdotes lost to the alpine winds high above the streets below.