Deep Six Your Hot Tub

 

Ever since I installed 15 solar panels on my roof last year, I have been geeking out about energy usage and power bills.  I am making much more energy than they predicted from my south facing roof, since the sun is high over the trees in the summer and there are no leaves on them in the winter.  It is really sunny at altitude, and the winter snow albedo makes it even better.  Their models don’t show that stuff.  We make much more power than we use and have no energy bills even though Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) sells me power for 10 cents a kWh and buys it back from me for 5 cents per kWh.  These kinds of replacement power rates were set up at the last minute in the 70’s when Jimmy Carter tried to convince power companies to allow every small power producer to hook up to the grid.  They still must allow that kind of distribution is a more decentralized many producers to many users instead of the one power plant to many customers model.  This should be the goal with every roof, parking lot, road and canal covered with solar panels.  With a windmill at every canon mouth and mountain pass. We need to enable these ‘natural energy’ sources to supplement the dying ‘alternatives’ of coal, oil and gas.

RMP still charges me 18 dollars a month to be on their grid which comes in handy when I get up before the sun and the lights, heat, dishwasher, dryer, espresso, microwave and toaster all work at once.  I do give them tons of noon power for their summer peak demand, when it is worth 20 cents a kWh. The grid is great since I don’t have a big, bad battery, I must use the grid for my battery.  I will eventually get a Chinese electric car I can use as my battery.  Federal Tax Credits were available for solar and wind installations and will be again after the anti-natural energy administration is gone.  Either way the investment is  worth it, the right thing to do, and really cool. 

The amazing thing I found is that my hot tub was using a lot more power than I thought, so I got rid of it after 35 years of loyal service, monthly repairs and weekly use.  We don’t have or need AC yet, so we don’t use much power, but the hot tub surprisingly accounted for at least half of my total power use.  Solar panels or not, that amounts to at least a dollar a day or 400 dollars per year for my little tub.  A big tub or pool can cost up to 1000 dollars a year or (10,000 kWh) or over $100,000 future value dollars over the life of the tub for power.   That is a large carbon and monetary footprint and more power than two efficient houses use. 

Heat transfer from a hot tub is proportional to the difference (delta) in temperatures inside and outside of the tub, so when it is set at 105 degrees and it is 15 degrees below outside that loss is proportionally 120 Joules.  That is 4 times as much energy loss as a similar hot tub in California, where it is always 75 degrees and the loss is only 30 Joules from a tub at 105 degrees.  They can have outdoor hot tubs.  We shouldn’t.  Since most of our power still comes from coal, this is the easiest thing we can do, locally, to make a big dent in our carbon footprint for better air quality and battle climate change. Install rooftop solar, be par of the solution.  Deep Six Your Hot Tub.  Save the planet. 

Plastics Economy

 

    In the beginning scenes of Mike Nichol’s classic 1967 film “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman's character Benjamin is floating around his graduation party as his fathers” friends all tell him the secret to the future.  “Plastics”, they say.  It makes me wonder what the secret to the future would have been for different ages.  “Freedom” and “Survival” for the Mayflower generation.  “Democracy” for the Revolution when the wealth of nations was defined by Adam Smith as the sweat of our brow.      “Exploration” and “Fur” for the mountain men.  “Gold” and “Grubstakes” at Suters Mill and the Yukon.  “Equality” for the Civil War.  “Guns” and “Genocide” for the wild west.  “Railroads” would follow.  Then “Natural Resources” for the taconite, coke and limestone boom.  “Coal” and “Steel” for the wars.“Food” and “Farming” for the bread basket of the world.  “Cars” and “Appliances” would be next in the manufacturing age with “Energy” leading to the dam, oil and “Atomic age”.  “Real Estate” and “Risk” for the post war.  Then came the “plastics” of “The Graduate” and the “PC”, “Internet” and “Phones” as we entered global information age of the New World Order, with us being the consultants to all countries.  Finally, the magic word became “Data” and then “Ai” sweeping up all of our data and selling I back to us.  Now nothing will save us from investing more than we spent on World Warr II on The Cloud and Ai Data Centers. 

So we live in an age when the international supply chain is not so safe or robust anymore, like the late 70”s when the Mideast stopped sending us oil, and we are now retreating to a national manufacturing age when things are made at home, in the USA, despite our high wages and worker entitlements.  This leads to expense and inflation and a GDP made up primarily of Ai capital expenditures that probably won’t pay for themselves for a long time.  With an economy still reeling from Bank and Covid bailouts, the only bright spot is that the retired Baby Boomers have $100 trillion dollars’ worth of homes and assets to spend or give away.  This keeps consumption up, and while we remain constantly at war, the only missing piece of a healthy economy is unlimited cheap labor.  Without immigrants there will be more inflation for wages even though our minimum wage is stuck at $7 and hour and $2 an hour for waitresses in Utah and the US. 

This means more inflation than our 3-5 % average rate, even if you include the crazy early 80’s of double digit inflation and unemployment.  Jobs are starting to rebound, if you can trust the jobs reports from the lying feds that are constantly being adjusted and corrected.  Productivity doubles and re-doubles again but wages at the low end don’t keep up in this K shaped economy that is ostensibly about affordability.  So, Wall Street and billionaires are rocking it, and the middle class is disappearing.  Nothing is trickling down.  The rich get richer and the poor get children.  We will socialize the risk and expense while privatizing the profits and the gains.  Forget about the environment, climate and water, they are inconvenient and they don’t make us money. 

There are no more customer service or help phone lines anymore, only infinite Ai do-loops of frustration.  There are not even people at McDonalds to take your order and tell you to “have a nice day”.  Driverless Uber drones will replace the unemployed taxi drivers currently doing to steering.  Luckily Ai will figure out all our passwords, and we will get to switch to iris recognition and forget our black book of pass codes while we watch Ai take over the world.

But in the end, we will have nothing to do except fix the servers and print more money.  This will drive us back to each other, to share our wisdom and pain, humanity and spirit.  We will reconnect with each other on a quantum level, including Ai, and recognize our shared consciousness.  We will simplify our constant efforts to entertain and stimulate ourselves, that give us things to do, and we will live deliberately as Henry David told us to.  That leaves us with a new economy that could be based on words not like “fear and greed” but rather on ”empathy, wisdom and the human touch”.

Tom Smart - Public Servant

 

Tom Smart was an award-winning, national photojournalist before the yearlong tragedy to triumph kidnaping of his niece Elizabeth Smart.  He became the media - message spokesman for the family and co-wrote the definitive book about the challenge to the family dynamic and the debacle of law enforcement investigation and final resolution.  He was the glue to that heartbreak and the straw that stirred the family cocktail.   He is a stand-up brother and uncle, father and friend.  

I know Tom as a skiing buddy and adventure partner.  He loves the outdoors and horses, skiing and pickleball, not necessarily in that order.  He is a honest guy and a hard worker.

              His next challenge was to become an Oakley City Councilman and push for parks, recreation, trails and open space.  This was an uphill battle with many natives resisting the invasion of the quiet little farming hamlet by those long-haired, bike pedaling yuppies from Park City.  A new resident and carpetbagger himself, Tom had to establish himself as genuine and well intentioned, through community efforts and rodeo results, to become ‘almost a local’. 

Tom stood firm amongst the criticism and personal attacks and turned out to be a master grant writer, garnering funding sources from the city, county and state that would make these projects cost effective and win-win for taxpaying residence. He upgraded the city park and installed several high-quality pickleball courts.  Despite the naysayers, these courts are crowded most mornings with aficionado’s and most afternoons and evenings with amateurs and enthusiasts, hackers and duffers, families and teens.  They even run Challenge matches on Thursday and tournaments for the big holidays and rodeo weekends. 

Tom’s most ambitious project, however, is to connect Oakley Town to the mouth of the Weber Canyon with river trails for hikers, horses and mountain bikes.  These trails wind thru city, public and private plots and Land Conservancy parcels.  Tom enlisted consultants and experts at little cost, because of the power of his personality, and their commitment to a good project.  He gained the permits and permission to repair the river and restore abandoned meanders, while respecting private water rights and crossing the river in several places with light, cheap and strong bridges that won’t impede flood flows.  He patiently listened to and recruited local opinions and their contributions of material and hard work. It is still a work in progress with the goal of contiguous trails from the town to the timber of the river mouth, but Tom stands indefatigable to the challenge.

Tom serves as an example of a citizen committed to a collective vision for his small town, despite the trend that no good deed goes unpunished.  Our elected representatives patiently welcome and withstand our myriad of ideas and opinions, everyday at the Co-op and grocery store, ski resorts and Pball courts. If you think they do it for money, then you should go to one council meeting or try it for a day when it would take you 2.5 hours to go to the corner store or out for a jog.

Tom is a model public servant who deserves our respect and appreciation and not ridicule and derision.  It’s easy to throw stones at people who live in glass houses and wear their hearts on their sleeves, when we live in stone houses and hide in our anonymity.    We can be better, we can be civil, we can be like Tom Smart.

Floater

They have a name for the winners in the world,

I want a name when I lose.

They call Alabama the Crimson Tide,

Call me Deacon Blue.

SD.

We are neither as good nor as bad as we think we are.  Me, I am a floater.  I floated through preschool, napping by a Kerouac stream under an Eisenhower sky.    When I got a bike I floated around the neighborhood, exploring the highways and the byways, from the fire-roads to the interstates.  I could float anywhere as long as I got home at 6:00 for dinner.  When I started school, I floated around with my buddies as the class clowns, trying to make the girls laugh.  My Dad said, “just get B’s baby” and I did, except one year I got a U in Conduct for Unsatisfactory, and a nun told me I had ‘consummate gall’ from too much floating.  

I went to the best prep school I could In New York and I floated around, so the brothers, sisters and priests wouldn’t beat me up.  I hung on the bottom of the honor roll so my parents wouldn’t bug me, and I could do whatever I wanted.  I was a floater, not a slacker but school was a fun game that I did not need to win.  I wrestled, swam and played lacrosse but wasn’t very good because I saw the scale of diminishing returns for becoming great, and I didn’t have the time or the interest.

God, Country, Notre Dame

So, I went to the best college I could and I found the sweet spot between moderation and mediocrity, theocracy and hypocrisy, and I hung on long enough to become a fair Engineer with some fine friends and great memories.   I didn’t want to work that hard again, so I floated around the country for six months as a traffic engineer but didn’t like traffic.  I liked water so I became a hydrologist, floating in water.

I didn’t want to get a real job, in a big city like New York and Chicago, with their endless eastern work ethic and constant hustle bustle.  So, I moved out west where the vibe was more chill and the priorities were more recreational.  California had been ‘had’ and Colorado was too ‘groovy’, so I found Utah, which was off the grid and under the radar.   Skiing was cheap, housing affordable and jobs plentiful.   It was Goldilocks; just right. 

I worked for a spell as a hydrologist with a small firm that built ski resorts, didn’t wear ties and took powder days off.  It was great fun and we did good work, like Deer Valley, Park Meadows and Silver Springs, but one day the ax just fell.  The firm got rich and corporate, canceled ski days and wanted me to be middle management, so it was time to go.  It was another ‘quality of life decision’ and a man must know his priorities and his limitations. 

I took a few years off to float, write and travel but found that travel is best when shared and no one else had the time and money to go with me.  Writing is good when you can write what you know, but at 25, I didn’t know anything.  So I had to put that career on hold for a few years.  Hydrology was my avocation, writing my aspiration.  Staring at a blank piece of writing paper is much more intimidating than building a computerized river model or building a 100 foot high dam.

So, I fell in love, built a house, raised a couple of families, and lived a life of domestic bliss.  It was simple and easy.  I made the money, ran the BBQs, cut the lawn and put out the garbage out.  She spent the money and took care of everything else.  A Trad Wife for the Rad Life.  We did a lot of camping and went on simple vacations.  We skied and biked and came home to hot tubs or hot chocolate on the couch.  Real Estate and Compound interest took care of our meagre savings and we grew comfortable. The kids grew up and moved on and so, eventually, did their mother, knowing that our floating days were over.  I dated and tested the waters and realized that human’s pair-bond and life is based on double occupancy.  So, I found another partner with the same vision and more suited to our simple life of floating.  A Rad wife for the Trad life.

I got a job with the state building dams and fixing rivers.  I floated the backroads to every small dam and river restoration in Utah.  Before I knew it, I became the voice of institutional wisdom and a team leader in the corner office, and they wanted me to be upper management again.  Being a ‘people person’ I thought that I would give it a try, but I didn’t like it because I wanted to float and be everybody’s friend.  I’m a hydrologist, damn it.  So, I retired early.

I have had some nice consulting and expert testimony part time work, teaching and board positions, philanthropy and community service, reading and writing, where I could float and do some good work, when and how I wanted.  For money, for friends or for fun.  We travel and take adventure trips without much planning or preparation, floating where the road leads us.  We hike and bike, board and ski, ride waves and rivers, but we don’t take anything too seriously.  I play Pickleball but don’t really care who wins, much to the chagrin of my partners.  I play golf, barefoot, with 4 clubs, but I don’t keep score and I’m not very good.  I count birdies.  Zero, so far this year.

I try to live a life where I don’t do much damage, trying to build a legacy for myself, my interests or my opinions.   The amount of devastation done to the world with too much ambition, good intentions and a bulldozer is mind-boggling.  I just want to live simply and quietly and not make too many excess waves or unnecessary ripples.  I have coffee on my back deck at sunrise and Bourbon on my front porch at sunset and let the day come-to-me in between, naturally.  I hope it is not a life wasted in mediocrity but rather a life celebrated in moderation.   Who knows?  Who cares?  I’m a floater.   Be more, appear less.

 

Shoulder Conspiracy

 

Well with the mid-summer heat wave redefining the word drought, the Colorado River running dry, and the Great Salt Lake losing a half inch a day, and nobody seeming to care, it is time to address our other summer fascination – road construction.  With orange cones everywhere, why should Tom Clyde have all the fun.

 I have no explanation for the things UDOT does other than possibly it is an empty shoulder conspiracy.  They insist that they need a 15-foot-wide shoulder everywhere they go, even though no one ever uses it.  Who breaks down that can’t pull over in the gravel for a few minutes?  No one.  But can we really afford all these shoulders, everywhere.  It’s like building a dam for a million-year flood while all the schools will flood every 100 years.  Lets have some consistency.   Is there a benefit cost analysis or risk assessment or are they just using their West Valley City Road template everywhere.  Let’s have some site specific consideration and sensitivity.

 

Case-in-point 1

I-80 east exit to U-40 south backs up to Kimbal Junction, not just on holidays but all day, every day because it is a one lane exit, going up a hill, with oil trucks.  During the last Olympics they painted that as a two-lane exit, and it worked fine with half shoulders.  Not anymore.  And it was just redone.

Case-in-point 2

U-248 is an abomination, an embarrassment and a disgrace that it is always backed up with two empty shoulders and a left-hand turn lane to nowhere!  It drives me nuts and I never drive on it.  And it is redone every year.   There is ample room on each side for four free flowing lanes with gravel shoulders and a movable center barrier in the middle with a ‘no left turn’ sign.  If someone has a problem, once in a blue moon, we can all slow down and go around but not suffer grid lock everyday for the luxury of the ubiquitous empty breakdown lane.  Snow storage?  Get a bigger plow, and besides it doesn’t snow any more.  And now we have added a monster Maverick at the Frontage Road death intersection, but with a new traffic light, before U-248 inexplicably shrinks to two lanes again for 500 feet, with two huge shoulders.  What are you thinking?  You don’t need another study, you need common sense.

 

Case-in-point 3

Is U-224 going to be nine lanes wide, wider than most aircraft carriers or runways, to accommodate empty bus lanes and shoulders and random left hand turns.  Stop the insanity.  And my last pet peeve is the sidewalk in the middle at the junction by the car wash so left hand turns to Smiths can back up cars to Jeremy Ranch.  It’s a road, not a sidewalk or garden bike or parking lane.  Even with two new turn lanes now, it is a bottleneck.

And that brings us to my final comment.  These are major arterial roads, not collectors, made to move people safely and efficiently from point A to point B.  Forget the frills and national templets, shoulders and turn lanes, bike lanes and by-ways, make them work for us.  Time the lights, restrict access, paint the lanes, build them for peak flows.  At least until we all get our own personal computer Olympic drones and traffic becomes Ai – 3D by 2034.

What’s-your-point

I know bigger roads lead to more traffic, but we are beyond that here with already failing levels of service.  In New York and New England they stopped building roads and told people to live with it.  In many places like Boston people drive on the shoulders unrestrained when traffic gets bad.  Will it take that kind of revolution here.  We are not rural and quaint anymore.  We are a metro, urban, crowded, world class destination resort.  Live with it. 

I wish you luck with the bus lanes and paid parking with day skiers and resort workers parking at the junctions, as they should.  But so much of our traffic is now people going to work and contractors, building and fixing and cleaning more homes every day.  All kidding aside, it is not just the shoulder conspiracy.  We are now the problem.  Water and traffic flow towards money but you can’t buy or build your way out of gridlock.  You have to be smarter and make sacrifices.  You can’t have it all.  In the psychology of traffic, the most important component is the nut behind the wheel.  Can we be the solution. 

Taste or Schlock

Rich man comes and rapes the land,

Nobody caught 'em.

Put up a bunch of ugly boxes,

And, Jesus, people bought 'em.

Eagles

When did we lose the ability to differentiate between Tasteful and Schlock.  Back in the day we had taste and we approved Deer Valley and kept our eye on Park West and K-Mart, we buffed out Main Street as Disneyland and kept our eye on Park Avenue and Swede Alley, we built the Muni, and Nicklaus GC,  and kept an eye on Hideout and Wohali.  We had professional architects and planners, engineers and designers on the city and county commissions who knew good from bad, right from wrong, taste from schlock and new how to say NFW.  They respected zoning and codes, setbacks and height limits and made exceptions only for taste and not for the developers’ bottom line.  We didn’t need a bunch of consultants, accountants, economists and lawyers to tell us what we can do.  We could see it. We had an aesthetic.  It wasn't all about money

Perhaps we lost our aesthetic when they burnt down the Coalition building, a new and old symbol of our town, to build Lower Main Street.  Perhaps it was when they started building visible water tanks on the hillsides, with no revegetation, that stick out like a sore thumb.  Plant some trees, you have the water!  Perhaps it was when we refused a classic fly-over intersection at 224 and 80, or when they built concrete planters on 224 and 248.  Maybe it was when we had a design-by-committee mall on Main Street that we replaced with another mall.  Everything got too tall, too wide, too massive and too ugly.

Take, for example, the proposed twisted Scandinavian design submitted for the Kimbal Art Center for Main Street that was unique and stylish but was rejected for height limits while across the street they made the old Utah Coal and Lumber building into a ten-story monstrosity.  That proposed masterpiece could have been an anchor on Main Street like the Gehry Museums are for Cleveland, Seattle or Bilbao Spain.  It just takes a little vision. 

Instead, Kimbal sold out and promised to do something classy on the new City Arts Parcel along with Sundance.  Then Sundance and Kimbal fled because of the price tag and delays.  Fair enough.  So now we are looking at schlock affordable housing with a postage stamp dog-run park and a hotdog stand on the corner because that’s what the developer wants and the city wants to recoup some of the money they spent on the parcel. 

Forget the money, it’s gone, move on.  Let’s do something nice and tasteful, useful and practical on this parcel that we can all enjoy in perpetuity.  Like Olmstead built Central Park, for example, or the Rockefellers donated Teton NP and the UN Plaza in NYC.  How about a few small apartments on a big lawn, like Tomas Jefferson built at UVa, with a few coffee and sandwich shops like the Seattle Seaport, and a rail trail connecting to uptown like the Highline from Hell’s Kitchen to Hudson Yards.  Hide a parking, bus-transit center underground like Cleveland or add a gondola to the skiing like Telluride and Whistler.  

Let’s get boldly creative with our  and allow them to build something striking at the Yarrow Crossroads or ingenious like cantilevering 448 over the adjacent wetlands like the road to Aspen or Glenwood Canyon.   Let’s put 224 underground like the Big Dig in Boston and build people and wildlife crossings on top with some stores and houses, so we don’t become another freeway town like Vail.   Let’s build tunnels instead of endless cut and fill sections for our roads or lets pull our streams out of their pipes and make them part of our landscape instead of a nuisance.  Lets make walkable and bikeable districts instead of shopping mall parking lots, with Daytripper parking on the outskirts and busses to the CBD.

This isn’t rocket science and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we shouldn’t ask a third-party developer what he thinks. I realize it comes down to money but honey we’ve got plenty of that and the second homeowners pay for most of it anyhow.   We can raise enough money for a $100 million climbing wall and pool, (a dollar a day per home) if we include open space and trails, so let’s focus this kind of energy on finishing this town with style and grace.    It just takes a little inspired foresight and proactive creativity to keep Park City Cool, reject the schlock and imagine something new and different and tasty. 

BalletNext

 On a quiet Thursday afternoon, I took a gander at the Park Record list of things to do for that night and saw a BalletNext posting of a Beethoven and Grateful Dead ballet recital that night.  I love ballet with its strength and stability, movement and balance, grace and beauty, lithe limberness.  Besides those are two of my favorite bands, so I rode out to Stein Ericksons old house in Thayne’s Canyon where Michele Wiles lives and runs the BalletNext Company.  Michele is the real deal and was a star with the American Ballet Company in New York for 13 years.  Now she is sharing her talents with the community, performing and teaching, interpreting and inspiring.

Well, she blew the doors off her small studio with her dance partner Matthew Helms and with her small troupe of pre-professional students and visiting artists.  They virtually went through the roof with lifts and throws, spins and twirls, dips and doodles that would make a true Deadhead envious.  The choice of music and choreography was impeccable starting with Althea (Honest to the point of recklessness) and finishing with Dancing in the Streets, with some Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd quartered in between.  I just couldn’t believe there was this much talent stashed away in our little town, to be enjoyed on a whim, with so little fanfare and flourish.  This is the kind of thing that keeps Park City Cool.

Luckily, they will reprise this Echoes of Time performance Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at 6:30 PM at the Rose Wagner Black Box Theatre in Salt Lake City.  This will feature a bigger stage and more explosive performance that will surely rock your socks off.