I saw a piece on the news this evening about Utah’s new 4/10 workweek for state employees, and the city view looked definitely smoggy. It could have been fog, but in the shot I saw it like smog.
Hope not!
Peace,
mangeorge
No. The air here is clean for a city of its size. When I returned from three weeks in tropical South East Asia, the first thing I noticed was that the air is here very clean, very dry and very thin.
That said, there are weird winter air inversions that can last for months.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20081231/ai_n31158880/
Depending on your altitude, if you are coming into the valley on I-15 over the point of the mountain, you can see a layer of automobile smoke over the city. You can also see this layer of smoke from the mountains surrounding the valley. The reason you can see it is because you’re not in in. But when you’re in it you don’t notice it.
Let me know when you get to town.
I’m not coming, thanks for the invite. 
I spent a couple days there in the late 60s. It was early summer and the air was crystal clear.
I will say you guys do have some funny street names. 
Do people still make those salt sculptures at the lake?
Not many people go out to the Great Salt Lake for recreation anymore. It often smells like a dirty vagina, there are lots of flies, some of which bite. The warm salt water can irritate your skin and it’s knee-deep for several miles. It’s kind of disgusting.
More people prefer the canyons east of the valley for outdoor fun.
Wow! people were floating around in it when I was there, because the water was so, well, “floaty”. The word escapes me, but your body would float higher in the water than normal.
I have heard that the lake level was going way down. I guess there’s no fix for that.
That’s too bad, but such is progress, eh.
I don’t know so much about salt lake, but Provo definately was when I lived there. It was terrible.
During the four years I lived there, Salt Lake City was never smoggy at all. Even when temperature inversions trapped clouds below the surrounding mountains, it simply remained overcast.
I’ve always wonbdered why – Salt Lake City is in a bowl, surrounded by the WasAtch Mountains to the East (and curling around to the north and south) and the Oquirrh Mountains to the West. I would’ve expected it to be pretty smoggy. Perhaps not having any major polluting industries helps (North of the Salt Lake valley are oil refineries, and to the South of it they still had steel plants, so the valleys north and south might have gotten smog on occasion – I never encountered it, but I wasn’t living there)
On the other hand, Denver regularly gets smoggy. Yet it isn’t contained in a valley at all! It’s against the Rockies to its West, but it’s open to North, South, and East. I’ve never understood why Denver gets notorious smog and Salt Lake doesn’t, when I would’ve naively expected the opposite.
Closing Geneva Steel helped alot. I go Provo every few months and it has been fantastically clear every time for years. Mt. Nebo is always crystal clear from Point of the Mountain 40+ miles away. It used to be you couldn’t see Timpanogos only 15 miles away. If you haven’t been in a decade plus you would be shocked at clear the skies in Utah Valley are now.
Salt Lake is the 7th top short-term particle air-pollution cities in the US, from 2008 State of the Air Report
http://www.stateoftheair.org/2008/key-findings/tables.html – Table Two link is a PDF but there you go. It’s due to the inversions. I live up on the side of one of the surrounding mountains down on the southmost end of the valley: you can REALLY see how thick the smog is from up there. Blue skies above, but a thick brown soup, very thick, above the city.
The air in SLC used to be absolutely horrible. Kennecott Copper was operating their smelter to the west, the discharge would get trapped along with the automobile pollution and would be just horrible at times. If you got above the inversion line it looked like a big bowl of brown soup.
Around 1980 Kennecott was forced to clean up the smelter. They built a stack that threw their pollution above the inversion line. That helped a lot.
The air quality depends on weather conditions. If there is wind and storms the pollution gets blown out of the valley. If the air is at all stagnant the pollution builds up because the mountains block it in. When you are in the valley you don’t notice the pollution as much as when you get out of it.