The Salt Lake valley suffers from winter inversions.
Normal atmospheric conditions are cool air above and warm air below. During an inversion these conditions flip trapping a dense layer of cold air under a layer of warm air. The warm layer acts much like a lid, trapping pollutants in the cold air near the valley floor. In the valley, you are grayed out. No sky, no sun. Just gray, or gray with fog. And with the pollutants trapped low as well, you get what my brother calls "chewy air." Here is what an inversion looks like from the mountains looking across the valley. The entire valley is smogged in. You wouldn't know there was a city all the way to the far mountains.
But the upside of this rather awful stuff is hoar frost. I love hoar frost. It is a crystalline deposit of frozen water vapor that often happens during our inversions and fogs. It is an amazingly beautiful phenomenon. Sometimes the entire landscape is nothing but ethereal gray and white. You have to enjoy every second of it, because the minute the sun touches it, it disappears. Sometimes it covers every surface, nook and cranny. Other times it just outlines an object. You never know what you'll get, other than it will be beautiful.
This next one is a little leftover piece of a spiderweb hanging from my porch ceiling--totally covered in hoar frost.
This might, at first glance, look like a fresh layer of snow, but it is a very heavy layer of hoar frost.
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