Originally Posted by
unterhausen
the road numbers are all in reference to the Temple in SLC, and there is a huge mountain range to the east.
When you move between different places, you encounter different conventions, sometimes vastly different, for navigating. When coming from outside to Utah, it would presumably take a while and maybe too late to figure out that everything is with reference to the Temple. An American sitting inside a building asked about the direction to North will likely answer correctly, because of the common use of geographic directions in everyday life. A European will be likely completely baffled by the question, because of the lack of such references in everyday life.
In Germany the direction for a freeway is indicated with the name of some small city where the freeway ends that you never heard of and presumably missed on the map, completely pointless unless you are a German resident. Of course in a foreign country you don't even have sense where major cities are, so the city names are of little use in the first place.
Conventions for marking hiking trails are bafflingly different in different countries and you can perish for real in the wilderness etc. After a hair raising adventure in French Alps, with getting lost after misunderstanding the trail markings, I encountered a grave with a cross and a date of 1936. Upon getting back to safety I chatted with a local about my adventure and laughed how hysteric I was given that the true mishaps are so rare. The response was that the cases of people perishing were so common, 6-7 per season per valley in the surrounding, that the local newspapers practically quit reporting those incidents given their commonplace nature.