Utah’s Salt Lake City is notably one of the biggest outdoor hubs in the country. It offers easy access to climbing and hundreds of miles of hiking and mountain biking trails in the Wasatch mountains, which sit northeast of the state’s capital. In the winter months, tourists and locals make their way to iconic nearby ski areas like Park City, Alta, and Snowbird. Despite the town’s laundry list of recreational activities, Salt Lake also happens to be situated next to an impending environmental and public health disaster: the ever-shrinking Great Salt Lake.
Nick Merrill, a resident of American Fork, a city that lies a little over 30 miles south of Salt Lake, tells the story of how a dust storm, not uncommon in this region, recently ruined a night out with his wife. Around Christmastime, they drove to see Jack Antonoff’s band Bleachers at the Great Saltair. During their commute, he recalls that they chatted about pollution along the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
Merrill, who calls himself “slightly more outdoorsy than most” people in Utah, says the show was incredible but noted that a dust storm started…
