Thanksgiving Inversion Hike

Well, despite the Thanksgiving holidays and my tight turkey-into-face-stuffing schedule, I'm also obligated to write something for our EH collective blogging effort this week. This is Ross by the way. This past Wednesday, 11/25, I was feeling lots of pent up energy. Having been chained to various tables in the library for the past couple weeks reading and writing papers, I was ready to burst come mid-week. So I rode my bike over to my old childhood stomping grounds, the foothills overlooking the Salt Lake valley and hiked to the top of mountain. Actually the mountain is best known as "the H-Rock", a giant black and white, spray-painted rock on the mountain side, a traditional symbol for nearby Highland High School. It's not a long hike to reach the top, but it's very steep. Hiking over sliding shale you have to take your time, lest you lose your footing and have an undesirable tumble backward.

One of the main reasons I decided to hike up this day was to see if I could actually get above the terrible smoggy inversion layer that engulfed the valley that day. Anyone who has lived along the Wasatch Front for sometime is familiar with what happens to our air quality on cold wintery days. Essentially the high pressure, warmer air presses down the colder air coming off the ground, and the enclosed, surrounding mountains don't allow it to escape. This has been a normal phenomenon in the valley forever. But in recent decades with our population growth, increased development, and more people driving automobiles along the Wasatch Front, things have gotten worse. Now we swim in a massive soup of our own automobile exhaust and factory and power plant emissions. Yuck! To read more about the inversion effect in Utah, this guy did a great job explaining it on his blog here)

From the top of the mountain I found a nice rock to perch on and I snapped off a few photos here with my cell phone camera. Having grown up here, I can testify that Salt Lake winters were never this bad. However, I do remember getting asthma when I went running when I was a high school soccer player, and that's when I began realizing what was happening.















It's hard to know what to do. Many of us can walk or bike, but for the most part we all still have to drive cars to get where we need to go. While UTA is pushing ahead with its mass-transit long range plan, we will just have to suffer through it. However, since the EPA revised its standards for stricter air quality to PM 2.5 (PM meaning Fine Particulate Matter), the State was given 3 years to reach compliance. This winter will be three years since then and the state will need to take serious measures to address our air quality situation. This is a good thing, but it also could mean restrictions on driving, incentives for taking the bus or Trax, handing out gas masks, who knows! You can read more about the State Implementation Plan (SIP) here. I for one favor any actions taken to get more people out of their cars and exercising.