VERMONT—Since the early ‘90s, Green Mountain National Forest has monitored visibility in the Lye Brook Wilderness Area from an IMPROVE (Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments) air monitoring station, currently located on Mount Snow. This year, the Eastern Region Winter Sports Team was instrumental to the monitoring efforts.

The aerosol visibility monitor measures fine particulate matter such as sulfates, nitrates, organic matter, elemental carbon and soil. The filters in the device are collected and changed once a week, regardless of conditions. This often has been a shared duty. Virtually every program area on the forest has made the trek up Mount Snow to collect the data and, this year, the Winter Sports Team is taking on the role. 

“The Winter Sports Team has been invaluable in the monitoring this past winter,” said Scott Wixsom, forest biological technician. “With tight workload on the Green right now, it would have been pretty challenging to pull this off without their engagement.”

The four-person Winter Sports Team currently administers permits for 16 privately operated winter recreation sites in Region 9 and provides technical support for other winter sports uses. Many sites are busy year-round. Warm months are dominated by mountain biking, disc golf, zip lines and an array of construction projects. Vermont's Mount Snow in Dover is one such area with a suite of uses and multiple projects always in process, which brings the team to the area regularly. Knowing the forest is also tasked with air quality monitoring at Mount Snow, the sports team offered to lend a hand.

“The IMPROVE program is really a great story demonstrating how we utilize the infrastructure associated with some of our most developed acres to monitor and indirectly improve the conditions on our least developed acres,” said Justin Preisendorfer, sports team lead. “The team was proud to be part of this effort.”

Thanks to the collaboration, the Forest Service had another successful data collection year in 2021 at the Mount Snow IMPROVE collection site. The data is used to document visibility improvement trends at the Lye Brook Class I area for the state of Vermont’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan, as required by the Reginal Haze Rule and the Clean Air Act,  administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.