I've lived in WA, UT, Virginia, and Canada, and from a social perspective, Utah is the weirdest, and is in the most obvious "timewarp." But I love it anyway.
Spokane is the 2nd largest city in WA. It has its quirks. But every city has its quirks.
My comment was directed only to the comparative size of SLC vs. Spokane. That's it. I wasn't shading my hand.
As far as metro areas, I simply wasn't doing that. The Spokane-CDA metro area has about 615,000 people. The SLC metro area has about 1.14 million.