Smog

A few days ago in the comments I bragged about Pasadena's natural beauty. Life Observer cautioned me not to be too proud, saying "we up here on the street are having a harder time seeing the mountains from Colorado Blvd., the last couple of yrs."

I took this photo from near the corner of Paloma and Sierra Madre Boulevards last Saturday. I've seen the smog worse lately, with the mountains barely visible from the same spot. I'd like to make excuses, like "it's the marine layer," or "stuff gets backed up against the mountains." The latter may even be true. But should that stuff be in our air in the first place?

We share air space with Los Angeles, after all. And, as Wikipedia says, "strict regulations by the Californian government have reduced the number of Stage 1 smog alerts from several hundred annually to just a few annually." When I moved to southern California twenty years ago it was two weeks before I realized I had a view of the mountains from the window of my studio apartment. Our air is much improved since then.

Obviously we still have smog, we're not perfect yet. I'll keep my bragging to a minimum and post an unattractive picture every once in a while.