It is hard to believe that it has been almost a year since Park City, Utah, hosted part of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Long before the Olympic Games, Park City was a small silver-mining town, founded in 1864. Since the early 1990s, Park City has undergone tremendous growth. Like other resort towns in the western United States, Park City's growth has resulted in a number of emerging environmental problems associated with water quality and quantity. These include high nutrient and high salt concentrations in streams, explosive residue in snow, and high concentrations of trace metals in surface water (Giddings et al., 2001).

My concern for these environmental issues really kicked in about 14 months ago in my freshman honors biology class. During a field assignment for this class at the wetlands near our school, I observed an absence of wildlife. I wanted to study the environment in this area with equipment that would help me measure the potentially "invisible" environmental contaminants in this area. With the assistance of my biology teacher, I used a field kit to measure phosphate in the water from the wetlands near our school. I found the phosphate concentrations were as high as 12 milligrams per liter. This level of phosphate could be part of the problem in the wetlands near our school by accelerating plant growth beyond natural conditions, resulting in eutrophication and extreme depletion of the oxygen in the water. This was the first step in my expedition to uncover the unseen factors affecting the water quality in my town.