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Show A-18 The Park Record M OUNTAIN TOWN NEWS SPA SPECIAL LOCALS ONLY Mountain Town News Plus, enjoy access to the steam room, tea lounge with refreshments, and outdoor pool and hot tubs the day of your treatment. * Must show Utah driver’s license. Valid on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays only. Does not include tax or gratuity. Valid only for signature treatments. 2100 FROSTWOOD DRIVE PARK CITY, UTAH PARKCITYWALDORFASTORIA.COM FLOWERS BY YO U FLORAL BAR Park City’s first and only DIY Floral & Terrarium Bar We carry fresh cut flowers, plants, succulents, planters, vases, gift cards and chocolates all made by local artisans. Workshops and classes coming very soon! We are open seven days a week from 2pm – 7pm. A Roundup of News from Other Western Ski Resort Communities ALLEN BEST 50% OFF 80 MINUTE SIGNATURE FACIAL OR MASSAGE FOR RESERVATIONS CALL: 435-647-5555 Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, August 11-14, 2018 When smoke gets in your eyes – and in your lungs LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – From Taos to Banff to Tahoe, the talk of the last week was all the smoke in the air. “Smoke coming in. Damn,” wrote one Telluride resident on Facebook Sunday afternoon. “We can’t even see the mountains,” reported a Jackson Hole resident Tuesday morning. Lake Tahoe has been smothered with smoke from fires in three directions, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “We couldn’t breathe,” a woman told a park ranger while in a huff to check out of a campsite along the Lake Tahoe shoreline. “We were going to go on a bike ride, but last night sucked. We’re going straight home.” With a fire raging on its southern flanks, the Yosemite Valley was closed on July 23 and it remained closed early this week. Air quality in Yosemite, said the Chronicle, rivaled that of Beijing. There, concentrations of fine particulates called PM 2.5—which measure 2.5 micrometers in diameter and smaller—are regularly six times higher than World Health Organization recommendations. In Idaho, PM 2.5 was bad enough at Sun Valley and Ketchum that on at least one recent day everybody was advised to stay indoors and keep the windows shut. Children, people with lung disease, and the elderly were advised to stay indoors on several days. California had giant fires last fall, continuing into December. During one smoke advisory, the Los Angeles Department of Public Health advised schools to suspend physical activities like gym, cancel after-school sports, and keep windows and doors closed. If air conditioning in homes drew air from outside, people were advised to go to LUNCH SPECIAL libraries and other designated air shelters with better-than-average air filtration systems, reports Sierra Magazine. British Columbia also has designated clean air shelters. In Colorado, pediatric pulmonologist Dr. Carl White told the Summit Daily News that children are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of the smoke. Children breathe more air for their body weight than do adults, magnifying the effect the air quality has on their bodies, he explained. “The second issue is that children are still developing their lungs, and more interferences with the normal lung chemistry means impact to growth and development of the lung.” PM 2.5 poses a danger to older people, too. Inhaling that PM 2.5 can turn the body’s clotting system on and increase the risk of heart attacks or strokes, he said. PM 2.5 can be safely filtered with N95 or N100-type particulate masks. Such masks can be purchased at Walmart, Lowes, and other big-box retailers. White told the Summit Daily the smoke has other dangers. “Carbon monoxide, acrolein, formaldehyde, benzene, benzopyrene, dibenzanthracene, nitrogen oxide and so on,” White reported. Many of these same chemicals are present in cigarette smoke. As such, breathing in mountain air during smoky periods is almost as bad as breathing second-hand smoke. White said that experiments about effects of smoke have been conducted on animals, but not human populations. “What we’re seeing now is a huge human experiment in progress.” Fires have been growing larger and increasing in frequency during the last 30 years in the West. British Columbia was in a state of emergency for 70 days due to wildfire, the longest in the history of the province. Harper’s Magazine points out that fires rarely exceeded 10,000 acres in size through much of the 20th century. Then, in 1988, a fire called Canyon Creek burned for months, covering 250,000 acres. It was an anomaly then. Not so much now. Blazes of more than 100,000 acres are called megafires. By Monday evening, the Yosemite fire was getting close. Aspen calculating how to suppress use of cars ASPEN, Colo. – Aspen continues to foment plans for its great transportation experiment next year. Now called Shift Aspen, the intent of the experiment, formerly called the Aspen Mobility Lab, is to see whether Aspen can be less dominated by the self-importance of the internal-combustion engine. If all goes as planned, people who normally drive into Aspen will be tempted to park their cars on the edge of the town and use alternative transportation: buses, e-bikes, and commuter shuttles. The goal is to peel back 600 to 800 trips per day into Aspen. A portion of this is intended to drive down the trips from Aspen’s outlying neighborhoods into the central business district. Expanded bike services will include bike mechanics at the intercept lot, with the hope that more people will be persuaded to park their cars rather than continue with the traffic congestion that routinely occurs at the entrance to the town when a four-lane highway narrows to two lanes in a series of S-shaped curves. The city last year spent $270,000 in hopes of making this three-month experiment occur this year. It didn’t happen, as companies and others hesitated or said they needed more time. The city estimates that the experiment next year will cost $2.3 million to $2.4 million. Most of that money will go toward providing more transit options. The Aspen Daily News reports the city also plans to partner with a mobile application that tracks various transportation uses. If you have downloaded the app to your smart phone, it will track when you’re on a bus or a bicycle or driving your own car. To get commuters to use the app, the city plans to offer rewards, such as price reductions on goods and serPlease see Mountain Town, A-20 $10 OFF Your $30 purchase DINNER SPECIAL $25 OFF Your $75 purchase We are OPEN during Construction! Shabu is Open Daily Lunch and Dinner 12pm–10pm Breakfast, Lunch, & Dinner WEDNESDAY – SUNDAY 1729 Sidewinder Drive, Unit 2 DOG FRIENDLY PATIO IS OPEN! (Prospector Square) FREE Parking • 1782 Prospector Ave ve 435.658.0958 • Goodkarmarestaurants.com (435)640-8968 I www.flowersbyyou.net CUSTOM HOME with views for miles IN HEBER CITY 1772 North Valley Hills Blvd 5 bd | 4.5 ba | 4,650 sf | 0.57 ac $835,000 | www.1772ValleyHills.com MURRAY GARDNER | More Than a Realtor 435.640.5184 Murray@GardnerGroupParkCity.com |