De-evolution. For Polly.

   

    While riding the ridge above Round Valley near the 5-way bench on a colorful, clear and cool autumn day under cerulean bright skies smelling of sage and success, I looked fondly at the back of the Wasatch and thought of how beautiful it was and what a great place to live, work and play it was.  Then I looked closer and saw that it was wall to wall houses and condos, roads and ski runs from Mayflower to Murdock, without much public access to our public lands.  “My God, what have we done,” I thought.  I began to try to imagine what this place looked like 50 years ago.

    There was an empty two-lane highway stretching from town to Kimball’s Junction with twice daily cow crossings and a frost-heave roller coaster near McLeod creek in the spring.  The Junction was just a Chevron station with stale donuts and Texaco station across the street with disgusting bathrooms.  If you sat in you car long enough a guy would come out and pump your gas, maybe wash your windows and check your oil.  There was no diamond interchange or flyover but just a freeway overpass full of potholes. The freeway was an improvement from the old two-lane Lincoln highway, but the lines were painted only once a year and indistinguishable in the winter.

    Park West ski resort was just everything North of the Lookout house and Tombstone was backcountry called Tuna Ville, Dream Catcher was Old Lady and Square topped was skied once a year in the spring, probably by a guy in a cowboy hat.  A few condos were being built at the base below the muddy parking lot, with electric heat and single pane windows.    The bar at the base, Smokey’s, was rocking from 3-6 in the winter but was dead otherwise.  The Snyderville meadow was all flood-irrigated hay and was still the true mountain Parley's 'Park’ that this city was named for. 

    Park City Resort stopped at the Thayne’s lift while Jupiter Bowl and Peak were just a dream away.   The Gondola ride was a long, slow and round 4-man cabin that took 25 minutes and two one-hits to get to the top.  The Mid-Mountain Lodge was at the angle station and served 25 cents mini beers from 3-4 for the last run down.  The Bars or at the bottom always had a band and sometimes raucous skier debauchery with wet tee shirt or ski throwing contests.  Deer Valley was called Frog Valley and Silver Lake was Lake Flat at the time and the road from town turned to dirt at the small Cat Houses on Deer Valley Drive that had been the site of raucous miner debauchery until 1953.  The magnificent red  Mayflower Maples were in another county, high up off of the two lane highway to Heber

    Main Street was gentrifying but still some places were boarded up from the ghost town days.  Properties could be bought for back-taxes, but nobody wanted them.  The EE, with its Hungry Miner potato and egg pie and the Coke and Number, with its Muckers Special Enchiladas with Pineapples, were the best places in to eat in town and The Other End, across the street had huge cable spools for tables out front for large loud parties.  Art still had the hardware store where you could have your self-esteem assaulted, by Art, while you picked through the mixed nuts and bolts.  Old Miners begrudgingly shared their favorite bars with the skiers but there was a tense hierarchy, with the hippies always at the bottom.  “Ski when its good, work when you should,” was our motto.

    I think I remember diagonal parking on Main Street, but that might have been a dream.  Poison Creek near current Lo-Main was just a sandy flood plain with a bunch of hippies living in sepia brown vans or avocado green station wagons and dilapidated miner shacks.  Someone threw the first shoes up in a tree there starting a tradition that continues today.  Every house in Old-town was falling down and included crooked floors, frozen pipes and flow through ventilation but could be rented for $100 a month.

    The golf course had only nine holes but they ran out of money building the greens so there were elephants buried under some of them. Thayne’s Canyon and Park Meadows were underway with some custom homes and a lot of Enoch Smith specials, with or without porches.  Prospector was a toxic waste dump and the kids went to school at Marsac and the High School on Park Avenue.  Jim Santy was the music teacher, not the Auditorium.  The City had purchased more snowplows so they didn’t depend on the county, SLC or National Guard to help plow the roads after big dumps.  Even with lethal flows from the mines, the water tanks would routinely drain, and we would have to cut back our use for a few days to fill them in case fire flows were needed.

    “Those were the days” I thought as I rode away down the custom flow-trail with super-elevated turns and rock paved wetlands.  “These are the days”, I countered when I considered how we had all grown up together into the town and the people we have become.  No matter where we go, there we are, with the choices we have made and the people we have chosen to share them with.  We have matured and some have moved on, but in the end it’s still a pretty great place to live, work and play.  Let’s keep it that way. 

Compounding Climate

    I am a weather geek.  I always have been.  Not everyone is, but if you live around here long enough, you start to notice the weather anecdotally.  Then you attempt to forecast it, but locals know that only newcomers and fools try to predict the weather.  It is the ultimate ‘you take what you get’.  Or is it?

At one time I fancied myself as a Hydro-Meteorological-Engineer but simplified that to plain old Hydrologist since I could not consistently say, let alone spell the first title.  I study weather and climate for my work and for my play, my hobby and my fascination.   I designed big dams for the million-year flood and advised neighbors on a local stream for annual snowmelt routing.  I personally and physically field checked the snowpack here, on every powder day, for 45 years.  The weather, for me, is not only anecdotal but visceral and personal.

I am a data nerd also.  Data is the basis for artificial intelligence as well as common-sense aptitude, and we cannot get enough of it.  When tasked by the State Engineer, to forecast snow-melt runoff from the record snowpack of the early eighties, I found precious little historical climate data for this area and none of the snowpack data correlated with actual runoff flows.  It turns out that the weather in May dominates snow-melt runoff, not the size of the snowpack.   When I saw the dearth of data for our area, I initiated my local Snyderville Weather Station to take the daily readings for the National Weather Service (NWS).  I wanted to be part of the solution.  Recently I won the national annual weather spotter award recently from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  So, I got that going for me.  Which is nice.

Lastly, I am a math bore and have learned how to correlate data with from several sources and locations to predict results at similar locations that have very little data.  When I read about the new PRISM - Geographical Information System (GIS) climate database from Oregon State University and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), I nearly wet my pants.  PRISM takes all the Annual Average Temperatures and Precipitation climate data from the last 125 years from sources like the NOAA, NWS, USDA, State Climatologist for the contiguous states and lays it out on a national GIS Geospatial database. That is one Annual Average Temperature point per year for the Daily Average, Daily Maximum and Daily Minimum temperatures.   That is a lot of Daily data condensed into 3 points per year.  Powerful.

From all those actual data locations it correlates the data from the 3 variables, with regression equations, to the desired locations with no data.  It also considers things like distance, altitude, and aspect to predict equivalent data for any desired location.  This database was built and prides itself on its accuracy in abnormal high mountain meadows and coastal climates that are my favorite places.   How cool is that?

      I downloaded, deciphered and plotted the data for Salt Lake and Summit County, Park City and Snyderville, North Carolina and North Dakota, San Simeon and New York City and noticed the predicted climate warming patterns outlined in most existing climate change prognostications.  The Average Temperatures for most of these locations are going up by the projected 1-3 degrees F over the 100-year period, just like scientists prosaically claim on the news.  Much of the temperature increase is related to the morning Minimum Temperatures rather than afternoon Maximums, with typical exceptions made for different seasons, sunshine and snowpack, cloud cover, wind and urbanization, humidity, ocean and lake affects, orographic, altitude and aspect.  These results correspond nicely to the linear trends in the Global Surface Temperatures data collected by the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) and published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This is good, consistent, calibrated peer-reviewed data.  We all know anecdotally this is happening, but we have no idea as to the extent.

      When I looked closer to home at the data for Park City and Snyderville it appears more interesting.  Temperature data trends for the last 100 years are notably higher, particularly for the last 50 years morning Minimum Temperatures.  Summer Minimum Temperatures, for example, have gone up 10 degrees (45-55 F) over a 50-year period in certain mountain meadows like Snyderville.  Wow. 

      I fit regression equations to the data and the standard, flat-line fits show the 1-3 degree increase usually predicted by independent climatologist.  I also installed a 20-year running average that tracked the data well and instituted a better fitting, third-order polynomial equation.  Both exercises follow the 10-degree Minimum Temperature rise of the last 50 years much more accurately, without exceeding the actual measured data.  These are actual data numbers that would make Greta’s bright baby-blue eyes pop right out of her head.

Most alarming are the extrapolations for the future that show the local morning Minimum Temperatures possibly increasing here by another 2 degrees (linearly) or 10 degrees (exponentially) in the next 50 years.  That would give us summer mornings like Salt Lake at best, Moab at worst.  That is real change, real heat.  Luckily, the local Maximum Temperatures do not see such radical rises, discounting common claims of urbanization, and winter minimum temperatures are even flatter, probably because of the tempering effect of our deep snowpack, mitigating and perhaps understating the Average Temperatures.   

Climate and nature, it turns out, are not linear.  The compounding effects of increased greenhouse gases, warming oceans, melting ice caps, frequent wildfires, population growth and economic development accelerate the warming trend exponentially.  If you get outside at all you are aware of these trends, but even I am surprised at these alarming local numbers and feel compelled to share these results with the community.  I can’t predict the future and I don’t have the answers, but I do know that it is getting warmer quicker, and we must stop burning stuff and not elect people who ignore the numbers and the science.  Will we continue to compound this inconvenient climate data or will we address it.  Will we be part of the problem or part of the solution.