Editor's Note: This is the third in an ongoing series profiling all 29 counties in Utah. Next: Daggett County, May 22.

It's five miles from the rugged mouth of the Baer Creek Trailhead to the blanched beaches of the Great Salt Lake.

But looking westward across the midsection of Davis County, it seems much closer - as if you could lift a stone from the path and skip it upon the lake's smooth and salty waters.

This is the state's smallest county in area. And as one of the fastest growing, it's a place where size matters.

Understanding that is as simple as taking a walk from the foot of the Wasatch Mountains to the shores of Antelope Island, through a swelling suburban landscape near the end of its growth potential.

Starting as the sun rises above the Wasatch Mountains, you can walk it in a day.

If you did, these are the steps you might take. These are the people you might meet. These are the stories they might tell.

On the edge: Just feet away from the sagebrush and boulders that mark the entrance of Baer Creek Trail, Keith Dickson watches from his front steps as his 6-year-old son bounces on a trampoline across the street.

Behind the bounding boy is a stunning panorama: A valley of homes, schools and businesses, punctuated by dozens of white church steeples - and, behind that, an unendingly expansive lake reflecting the rugged, dark silhouette of Antelope Island.

Dickson moved to Fruit Heights just before his son was born.

The geography of the lot Dickson purchased - and the fact that his back yard opens into a national forest - ensures his home will never be surrounded by others.

In that, he is uncommon among Davis County residents.

When Dickson's son is old enough to attend school, he probably will get there via Nicholls Road - a steep and winding route flanked by cattails, barbed wire fences - and plenty of homes.

The old farmhouse once belonging to Vernon Nicholls still stands, but it is no longer surrounded by farmland. In the 118 years since the Nicholls home was built, its fields have given way to subdivision.

Residential legacy: Population growth isn't a new story here. It was that very issue that, back in 1911, stirred a countywide debate about the need for more schools - and where to put them.

Three years later, county officials decided to build a central high school, just down the road and around the corner from Nicholls' farm.

Two hundred and eighty students attended class in Davis High School's inaugural year.

By 1978, when Corine Sayler arrived at Davis High as a student teacher, the school had 1,500 students. Today, as assistant principal at the Kaysville school, Sayler reviews class schedules of about 2,300 students.

There are eight high schools in the Davis County School District. A ninth school, in Clearfield, is on the county's chalkboard.

"There is such a legacy here," Sayler says as she walks the hallways of the school's ultramodern main building. "There are many teachers here, right now, who have in their classes students whose parents and grandparents all attended school here."

Morning sip: Two and a half miles up Main Street, in Layton, inside a small white building just across the Interstate 15 overpass, Mary Van Kamen moves clockwise inside a horseshoe-shaped counter, pouring coffee and making small talk with the half-dozen white-haired men huddled in Sill's Cafe.

The smells of bacon and butter waft from the narrow window that separates the steaming kitchen from the dining room.

Van Kamen takes a few orders. Most she already knows.

"Don, for instance," she says as a regular climbs onto a corner stool. "Don always gets coffee. Coffee with creamer. That's all."

The young waitress - a beauty school alumna with plans of working on movie sets - floats toward Don Weaver and pours his coffee. Weaver thanks the girl and he blushes slightly when she smiles at him in reply.

With the exception of the years during World War II - in which he flew 35 missions over Germany in the cockpit of a B-17 - Weaver has been a Davis County resident all his life. Of eight living siblings, seven still reside here.

"We couldn't afford to get out," chuckles the 82-year-old accountant, who still prepares other people's taxes each spring.

"No, no," he chides himself. "We like it here - the main thing is, I like the mountains and I like the people."

Some old-timers pine for the days before the war - before Hill Air Force Base - when there weren't so many people between the mountains and the lake.

Like others, Weaver fondly recalls hunting pheasants in the fields that once surrounded this cafe. But he takes the population explosion in stride. "It's a nice place," he says, pausing to sip his coffee. "It's where people want to live."

The Gentiles: As jobs in Salt Lake City, Hill Air Force Base and the 7 million square-foot Clearfield Freeport Center continue to draw residents to Davis County, developers are working overtime to accommodate new residents.

Nearly 2,000 building permits were issued in Clearfield, Syracuse and Layton combined last year.

Much of the development is occurring just around the corner from Sill's Cafe, on a long and straight two-lane road called Gentile Street.

Named for farmers who did not embrace the predominant faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gentile Street is now home to at least three LDS wards and much of Davis County's subdivision development.

Between century-old farm homes, onion fields and cow pastures, planned developments are marked with colorful flags on PVC poles and free-standing wooden signs, heralding the coming of divinely livable-sounding neighborhoods with names like "Coldwater Creek," "Rockwell Estates" and "Feathering Sands."

One such sign recently appeared in the lot next to Steve McLendon's home. A few weeks later, a train-car-sized mound of dirt appeared a few yards from his fence.

Sensing that such development was drawing near a few years ago, McLendon bought a half-acre parcel behind his own home to provide his two sons room to romp. The lot cost him $32,000; it's now worth twice that amount.

But as the lot's value rises, so does the cost of keeping it undeveloped. McLendon says his taxes have risen dramatically as Layton grows around him.

With that in mind, he figures it's just a matter of time before the entire area is built out.

"With all this growth, it doesn't make sense for farmers to own this land," McLendon says.

Island refuge: Even at the far west end of Gentile Street, which runs alongside the wetlands of Ogden Bay, the nearest subdivision is less than a half mile away - and approaching fast.

And the same is true just a few miles north and west, where a small brown hut marks the entrance to the Davis County Causeway, a seven-mile isthmus leading to Antelope Island.

Inside the hut several mornings each week Susan Sullivan sits and listens to a small radio, reading paperback fiction as she waits for park visitors to pass.

For now, cows graze on a few hundred yards of pasture between the hut and the nearest subdivision. "But it won't be long before it's all gone," Sullivan says.

Across the causeway, on the island's rocky western shore, Peter Lee stands on a jagged boulder and stares out toward two young friends, both knee-deep in salt water as they slosh toward a smaller island.

"I offered a dollar to the first one who touches that rock," laughs Lee, the boys' church youth group leader.

Lee arrived in Davis County following a nomadic life. He has since married and purchased a home in Syracuse. He and his wife are expecting their second child in August.

"I know there are good people everywhere," he says of his newfound home. "But it's got something to it that is just hard to find elsewhere."

The boys reach the small island, sending thousands of seagulls aloft into the sunset. Their collective flapping wings sound like a hailstorm.

"When everything else is houses, this will still be here," says Lee.

"We need houses. But we need places like this too."