Sandy

The name comes from a Goshute word meaning "black bear," though the Goshute people who gave this valley its name saw their last grizzly disappear from the Oquirrh Mountains sometime in the 1920s. The word "Tooele" carries the sound of wind through sagebrush and the memory of massive bears that once denned in the canyons above what would become Utah's third-oldest continuously inhabited settlement.

Tooele spreads across the floor of Tooele Valley at 5,053 feet elevation, thirty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City, where the Oquirrh Mountains rise abruptly from valley sagebrush to peaks exceeding 10,000 feet. The settlement sits precisely where [[rabbit:Settlement Canyon]] cuts through the western slope of the Oquirrhs, creating the only reliable year