Originally Posted by
SEAtoSummit
When did you depart The Beehive State? The OP probably deserves to have some context as to how old your anti-Utah gouge is. Some of your critiques were probably somewhat accurate in the 80s or 90s. A lot has changed in the last couple decades - especially after the Winter Olympics, when Utah rolled out the welcome mat to the world. Demographics, population, attitudes and liquor laws have all changed quite a bit. Your point about the Boy Scouts, for instance, is now false. The LDS Church cut ties with the BSA about 5 years ago. If you sign your kid up for Scouts, I 100% guarantee they won’t be meeting in, or sponsored by, an LDS chapel.
Sorry you had a crappy experience living in Utah, but you seem to be offering the OP pretty outdated info, sprinkled with some tired old anti-Mormon tropes.
^ This. I get it - I knew folks who were born and raised in SLC in the 70s. They told all kinds of sad stories about the non-LDS kids being frozen-out of the neighborhood play groups. Old timers tell these absurd-sounding tales of how the alcohol laws evolved over time. For awhile, bars could only serve hard liquor in those airline-style single-serve bottles. And something about drinks had to be mixed behind a screen, not in view of the customer. In the early 2000s, I had the opportunity to view the "gotta have appetizers with a drink" dance, and all the shenanigans that went along with it. Oh, and in the early 2000s, there were no "bars" in Salt Lake City. Only "Private Clubs" that you had to be a "member" of, and your membership had to be "sponsored" by a current member. The bouncers or the bartenders would "sponsor" anyone who came through the door. A strange kabuki theater. Still got my membership card to Port 'O Call around here somewhere...........
The whole city has changed drastically over the last 20 years. I'd wager it's changed more than any other region of the country. Some of the idiosyncrasies remain (State-run liquor stores, etc). But a lot of these criticisms seem stubbornly stuck in the past.
Originally Posted by
game
I have a feeling I’ll get thrown out the door for asking, but what are the feelings of SLC based pilots who live in base regarding the GSL drying up and the environmental fallout?
Media scare tactic? Actually drying up? Maybe people aren’t talking about it because those who live there know something we folks back east don’t. Just curious as this would play into my calculus if considering uprooting and moving to the SLC base after my old relatives die off and i’m unchained.
Not a SLC resident, but I spend some time there, and try to keep up with the local news. And I just don't know what to think. In the 80s, the lake rose to a point that the state spent 60 million to install massive pumps on the west side of the lake to drain water out into the west desert (Google Bangerter Pumps).
In 1982, after one of the strongest El Niño events ever recorded, Great Salt Lake was monitored for expected flooding. Starting late May of 1983 the massive snowpack melted fast and the lake rose around 20 feet, nearly doubling its surface area. I-80 was swamped, downtown Salt Lake was swamped, and in other areas of the state, entire mountainsides washed away. Great Salt Lake’s flooding during this period is estimated to have caused around $240 million in damages to roads, railroads, private property, and infrastructure such as sewage treatment plants.
Note the lake has an average depth of only 16 feet, so the fluctuation was huge. And now, they've got the opposite problem. And all that mud and muck at the bottom has got to have all kinda of nasty stuff in it from ~150 years of runoff from SLC and the surrounding areas. The Great Salt Lake is salty because it only has inflows, and no outflows. So every mineral, toxin, and everything else that's ever flowed in there stays (with the exception of the water that evaporates off).
At the same time, the mountains have been getting hammered with snow this year. I've heard various anecdotes, but one was "most snowfall in 20 years." One year won't fix things, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Who the hell knows though.
As others have mentioned on the topic of weather, you'll want to look up the phenomenon of the "inversion" and SLC. I'm no meteorologist, but imagine a bubble of cold air heading East, hitting the mountains near SLC, and stopping for 10 days. And every pollutant from cars, refineries, etc gets into that cold air bubble and stays. It's.....not healthy. Eventually, a weather pattern comes through and blows everything out, and it's blue skies again, but when the inversion is here, it sucks.