Salt Lake City is a wonderful place to live, with great access to outdoor activities like skiing, mountain biking, hiking, and fishing.  We do have a problem with pollution though.  When high pressure systems settle in, the air down in the valley gets trapped between the mountains that surround us.  The smog gets much worse in wintertime during inversions.  On “red days”, residents are encouraged to limit driving and cautioned against exercising outside.  I can see the air in front of the houses across the street when I open my front door, and I can taste it in the back of my throat.  One Utah public radio commentator said that we were “swimming in our own toilet bowl.”  I have assigned myself the personal project of photographing the air when the smog gets bad.  Unfortunately getting pictures of air is not as difficult as it sounds in Salt Lake City!

This was taken a few days ago after just a couple days of smog buildup:

These were taken during our last big inversion in the middle of January: