But breathe easy. They aren't traveling to Logan to make good on threats to slap penalties and restrictions on you for your sometimes-mucky-and-yucky air.

Instead, officials from the Environmental Protection Agency's Region 8 office in Denver want to salute you for your efforts to battle those wintertime inversions that plague the bowl-shaped Cache Valley.

"Because of the positive things you've done, they want to recognize you," Lloyd Berentzen, director of the Bear River Health Department, told the Cache County Council this week.

Residents of Logan and neighboring communities as far north as Preston, Idaho, enjoy panoramic mountain views year-round, but the valley's topography can prove dangerous in the winter when air pollution from wood-burning stoves, coal, cows and cars becomes trapped in the basin.

This past winter, thanks to cooperative weather, the Cache Valley violated the EPA's more stringent air-quality standards on far fewer days. Even in a more severe winter season, though, Berentzen said improvements in daily pollutant levels would be evident.

"The weather has a tremendous amount of influence," he said. "If we did have a bad winter, I believe that some of the things that you are doing would have made a difference. Really, you have a lot to be proud of in this last year."

Those initiatives include daily air-quality notices, a "Choose Clean Air" marketing and education campaign and smoking-vehicle "fix-it" tickets. Annual subsidies from Cache County and a new vehicle-registration fee have helped fund these and other efforts, Berentzen said.

Cache County Councilman H. Craig Petersen, a new appointee to the 11-member state Air Quality Board, said the valley's air quality was "better off than other areas in the state in January."

"Cache Valley has probably gotten a little bit worse rap about our air quality than we should have," Petersen said.

But Rick Sprott, director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality's Division of Air Quality, said that, while news reports may be frustrating, the facts are valid.

"We had a lot of days that exceeded the standard," Sprott said. "Throughout the season, actually, Logan had lower levels [of air pollution] than other areas in the Wasatch Front."

Even so, Sprott said, leaders in Cache Valley and elsewhere in Utah still face a tough task corralling air pollution.

"We're in a bit of a tussle now with the EPA because we're going to be one of the first areas of the country to be [faced] with nonattaiment because of our mountain ranges," he said. "It is really important to get as much information and ammo upfront so we can figure out how we want to solve it - instead of somebody else."

abrunson@sltrib.com