Messo Valley News, November 23, 2021
Author: Heather Hansman / High Country News
Snow is alchemy, a perfect combination of cold, water and air. You can feel the artificial difference—hardness and grip—and the complete crystal of the freshly dropped crystal. The snow is also very loud, the cold storm creaks, the ball of corn mud or the crackling of rime ice. The thing about the thousand words of snow is right.
If we lose the ebb and flow of the winter tides—and we will do it soon—we will also lose the power to chase the storm and the pressure adrenaline to wait for the storm. It is risky to put your heart on the weather, we skiers hang everything on the snow. When you keep observing the storm track and snow gauge, trying to predict the deepest place, you know you are in trouble. For example, when you focus on the La Niña storm trajectory and farmer’s yearbook forecast, let the logistics of the real life you want to live in disappear into the background.
The biggest survival threat to skiing is wintry selection in winter. The viability of ski towns and this sport depends on snow accumulation, which is decreasing due to global warming. Depending on the emission scenario you choose, it is expected that by the end of this century, snowfall will be reduced by as much as a third. This weak weather will have a huge impact on the future of skiing and whether people can continue to rely on the seasons to maintain their lifestyle. Not only in the dry southwest, but also in British Columbia, where the level of icing is rising, and in New England, almost every ski resort now relies on artificial snow. It is easy to forget this problematic future in the deep winter, but it is very clear in the light winter. Skiing is one of the most carbon-intensive outdoor sports, because less snow or more rain requires more energy and water to make snow.
The worst winter I have ever lived in the mountains, I volunteered to do ski patrols in the Arapajo Basin in Colorado. At the beginning of the season, we avoided the steep slopes of Paravicini Peak and used our skis to cover the snow Fill it up so it will stick to the mountain. We tried in vain to grab some kind of base and keep the mountain open. Mainly we try to maintain our sanity and protect the sanity of others. When it's not snowing, the land doesn't look right. A deep depression swept the entire community. Everyone will become irritable. Spending a few dry weeks in a ski town will make you doubt the value of waiting for the weather. Despair began, and that special season turned into a series of snow-praying parties and snow-burning bonfires to sacrifice to the Snow God. I did a lot of skiing with beauticians dressed as hot dogs to make things feel a little fun.
But every new season depends on the hope for a deep fan day. Did we often talk about climate before? Is December always so dry? If the situation gets worse, can we really continue to do this?
The erosion of winter not only frustrates ski lovers and weather nerds who focus on skiing. Rising temperatures and shrinking snow will affect water supply, food security and economic viability. Shorter, warmer winters and precipitation in the form of rain instead of snow, everything from power generation to fish migration is messed up. When skiing is bad, everything is bad.
The scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the snow season in the western United States has been shortened by 34 days since the early 1980s. The study stated: “Given that industry operators have to bear a lot of costs when using snow-making equipment, the overall decline in snowfall inhibits profitability.” Even if the snowfall continues, it is difficult to persist. In the life cycle of people who have witnessed the evolution from rope traction to large resorts, ski resorts have begun and gradually disappeared, and when today’s children grow up to work in ski resorts, the skiing world may happen even greater Variety.
According to Liz Burakowski, a climate scientist at the University of New Hampshire, it is not easy to model the future of winter storms, because interrelated factors such as El Niño, sea ice or snow in Siberia create a complex problem. But despite the wide range of variables, there is an obvious warming pattern due to the way carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere and heats it up. "The trend towards the end of this century is that the winter will get warmer by 8 to 10 degrees," she said. "This keeps many places above freezing; the margin is small."
This means that some resorts, especially those small resorts that cannot create their own winter through snowmaking, and are located in low altitude or southern latitude areas, will find it difficult to maintain economic viability in the near future. As the winter gets warmer, even places that invest in snowmaking are powerless. Even if you have snow-making equipment, if it rains or is hot, you cannot leave it on the ground.
Brakowski is the kind of scientist who can both rationally view facts and rationally view models. She still retains the emotional side of losing the winter in her mind, which makes her very good at seeking truth from facts-this is what she feels more and more Work is urgent and important.
She said that it is difficult to understand it only by simulating range and temperature peaks, so a large part of her task is to make science easy to understand through storytelling. For example, talk about how her mother used to ice fish in a lake that no longer freezes. She said that a big problem in the ski industry is the terrible back-to-back winter, because after a few strikeouts, recreational skiers start to lose motivation. If a family of skiers skips several seasons, their children may switch to other sports. Suddenly, your population has decreased, and the weather patterns have also weakened.
The biggest imbalance in climate change is, in almost any case, that the burden is not distributed fairly. The people most affected by warming are often those least able to isolate themselves. As the winter gets warmer and shorter, the most difficult ski resorts—small ski resorts in low, dry areas, short of funds—start to need more help. They need snow guns that they can't afford, or water rights for snow making, or ways to shirk responsibility in years when they can't open them. In the face of climate change, some ski resorts will actually be better, at least for a period of time, due to company insurance, these ski resorts are definitely already in financial advantage. If the number of skiers stays the same, but the number of viable resorts decreases, then places like Mammoth Mountain in California with an altitude of 9,000 feet and a mountain of snow gun teams will be busier, and the altitude is lower and Operating in places with lower prices—for example, Ski Santa Fe—will not do the same. The country’s snowy spine is already full of failed ski resorts.
I am very afraid of such a place, what will happen if they can't survive. Although the Santa Fe Ski Resort has thousands of feet of ski trails and steep trees for skiing, it is suitable for families and church groups. It reminds me of places like Cannon, where I grew up skiing, in the Ashland Mountains owned by the Oregon community. It's Loup Loup in eastern Washington or Hesperus in southern Colorado, where you can go skiing at night on squeaky slow double chairs. Places like this still insist on the idea of winter, even though it rarely appears now, it is easy to disappear.
The realistic future of skiing is a question of what is natural, what we are trying to create or maintain, and how long we can persist in the past.
The outdoor industry has a beautiful halo, which has spawned environmentalists and cultivated people who want to protect the mountains. But just because you like skiing does not mean that you are doing anything specific or influential to protect it. Due to the ideals of the last century regarding the use of public land, half of American ski resorts operate on government-owned U.S. Forest Service land. This means that anything these ski resorts do to attract tourists or improve the skiing experience will affect collective resources, whether it is water supply or wildlife migration. That was before you even considered the fallacy of federally owned public land, and how the US government took it from Native American tribes before it considered it public land. We have always believed that the attractive outdoor economy is benign, but just because we like the outdoors does not mean that we will not overuse resources or destroy the landscape. It is not just climate change and large-scale warming that affect the skiing experience, but also the way we skiers use resources, as well as the chain effects of snowmaking, transportation, trail cutting, and energy needs.
We have always believed that the attractive outdoor economy is benign, but just because we like the outdoors does not mean that we will not overuse resources or destroy the landscape.
Think about snowmaking-88% of resorts in the United States use snowmaking to maintain their operations in the light winter. "It's great when it snows, but when there is no snow, we won't open the door," JR Murray, the general manager of Arizona Snowbowl, told me a few years ago when they were trying to find a water supply for snowmaking. "Our ski season lasts 20 days, and some even reach 400 inches. The difficulty is that you can't plan. You can't hire and retain employees. So we need to make snow to stabilize the situation." It adds some key smoothness to the climate curve. But it’s expensive and resource-intensive, and it’s difficult to maintain in different ways, especially because you can only make snow when it freezes.
According to data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, by 2020, the past five winters will be the warmest on record, and this situation is unlikely to stop. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, under higher emission scenarios (the path we are currently on), total seasonal snowfall is expected to be reduced by 10% to 30% by the end of the 21st century. This affects far more than skiing. In New Mexico, the Rio Grande River is the main source of water for many of the largest population centers, and the river often dries up during the summer due to overuse and overallocation. The low snow at the source of the mountain makes it even more dangerous. This is all connected and is crashing.
Liz Burakowski and other climate experts are trying to turn these numbers and predictions into feelings, allowing us to take action, even if it feels overwhelming and scary. When I think of losing snow, thinking of the contrast between my childhood memories of snow and the gray slush now, I feel a deep bowel pain. I am scared, sad, and always sad. How could it go bad so quickly?
"Solastalgia" is the name of the feeling that the world around you is changing when you are told that it will stabilize. This is the survival dilemma caused by climate change, and the unanchored sense of landscape changes underfoot. It makes you feel homesick for your life and feel uneasy when the weather changes. This is a deep anxiety about the hot and snowless winter. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who created this sentence, blended comfort, nostalgia, and desolation to capture the wave-like sense of loss. I feel it almost constantly these days, continuously and imperceptibly.
Psychologists say that the best way to deal with climate grief is to go to places where you can rejuvenate and remind yourself of the tenacity of our connection to the land. But when those areas that should support you can no longer contain snow, it will be more painful.
So far, the narrative of expeditions in the mountains has been about the first ascents and descents, but looking to the future, we may be more likely to talk about the last one.
Excerpt from "Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow" by Heather Hansman, used with permission from Hanover Plaza Press/HarperCollins. Copyright High Country News.
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