A desolate, arid region known as the West Desert, situated west of Salt Lake City, contributed roughly half of the dust, while the Great Salt Lake’s dry beds deposited nearly a quarter of it. Using information from storms that hit that winter, including atmospheric conditions and wind direction, they determined where the dust came from. To better understand the situation, Skiles and her colleagues took samples of snow from an area near Alta Ski Resort, located just east of Salt Lake City in a popular skiing region called Little Cottonwood Canyon. “But I didn’t necessarily think it would be as important of a dust source as it was.” “We’ve known in the past that we’re getting dust from the dry lakebed,” says Skiles to the Salt Lake Tribune’s Leia Larsen. (The dust is also polluting the air and may raise residents’ risk of respiratory issues.) This dust layer absorbs more sunlight than pure, white snow does, causing the powder to melt more quickly. When the wind blows, it carries dust from the lakebed up into the mountains and deposits it atop the snow. The saline lake is drying up, in part because of human water consumption, which means more dry lakebed is exposed to the air. The disappearing Great Salt Lake is at least partially to blame for these trends. Another ripple effect: With the ground snow-free earlier in the season, that makes the surrounding forests drier-and perhaps more vulnerable to wildfires. It also can overwhelm the state’s water infrastructure, which is set up for a slow and steady trickle of snowmelt, not a rapid influx. It makes ski season shorter for the state’s many popular resorts, which collectively helped infuse more than $2.35 billion in direct visitor spending into the local economy during the 2021-22 season. So much dust coated the region’s famed powder-nicknamed “the greatest snow on earth”-that it melted 17 days earlier than it would have without any dust, per the study.Įarlier and faster snowmelt is an issue for several reasons. Now, she and her colleagues report that her hunch turned out to be right: Snow in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains east of Salt Lake City was dustier in 2022 than in any winter since scientists began keeping track in 2009, according to their new paper published in June in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Skiles, a snow hydrologist at the University of Utah, did what any good scientist would do in response: She set up an experiment to figure out why. While shredding Utah’s ski slopes last year, McKenzie Skiles noticed something peculiar: The snow seemed a lot dirtier than normal.

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