The start of the winter season has been difficult for snow sport enthusiasts across Vermont.
Save for a few December inches of snow — including one storm that brought rain, a flash-freeze, near-record wind and lightning — the floor of the earth has remained shades of green and brown, only occasionally nestled in a thin blanket of white.
Scientists in Vermont have documented the state’s rapidly warming winters. As snowmakers at ski resorts hustle to keep pace with the changes in weather conditions, skiers have felt the impacts.
Vermonters have, on occasion, seen less snow and felt warmer temperatures in the winter, even before climate change became a household term. But many people in the snow sports industry say they have been observing weather trends that feel less and less like the norm.
“I’ve asked the same thing myself — is this normal?” said Robert Drake, director of Rikert Outdoor Center in Ripton, which hosts cross-country ski trails. “No, it’s not normal. This is the worst year that we have seen here at Rikert in quite some time.”
Rikert maintains 55 kilometers of trails. Artificial snow is available on 5 kilometers, and half as many have snow cover.
Robert Haynes, a meteorologist with the Burlington station of the National Weather Service, said it’s been warmer than normal for the last three months.
“The impacts of climate change are being realized on a regional and local level,” he said.
Average temperatures in the last three months have floated between 3 and 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal, according to Haynes. At 52 degrees, the warm weather set a temperature record on Dec. 30.
Mad River Glen closed on Monday and Tuesday to stockpile its artificial snow for busier days — mountains in Vermont are particularly busy on the weekend of Martin Luther King Day.
Ry Young, marketing and events manager at Mad River Glen, said every year “presents its own set of challenges, especially these days, living in New England. We see a lot of temperature swings.”
“That’s just part of the business,” he said. “We are a very weather-dependent business, obviously, being a ski area, so, we just need to be flexible and adapt to whatever challenges are presented to us.”
Jay Peak has been faring a little better, according to Mike Chait, the resort’s communications manager.
“It’ll snow for three, four days straight, and you know, pick up all this good snow,” he said. “That’ll open up new terrain temporarily, and then we’ll have one of those meltdown events that forces us to close things down.”
While it’s cold, snowmakers get to work, building up a base that can make it through the next melt event, Chait said.
Meanwhile, the Catamount Trail, a network of cross-country ski paths that run the length of Vermont, relies entirely on natural snow.
“It’s pretty thin everywhere,” said Greg Maino, the organization’s communication director. “Anecdotally, I know most of our tours that are across the state are being canceled right now.”
In the Vermont Climate Assessment, issued in November 2021, scientists showed that winters are already getting warmer by almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. The freeze-free period has become three weeks longer since 1960.
The season for snow sports will become shorter, the assessment says.
“Downhill skiing, with the help of snowmaking, will likely remain largely viable in Vermont up until approximately 2050,” the report states. “By 2080, the Vermont ski season will be shortened by two weeks (under a low emissions scenario) or by a whole month (under a high emissions scenario), and some ski areas will remain viable.”
Despite a light dusting of snow in some areas of the state on Thursday, the warm and soggy weather is likely to continue into the weekend, Haynes said.
“It looks like pretty much everyone should see a transition to rain by early Friday morning,” Haynes said. “Even some of our ski resorts in areas up at 3,000 feet above ground level look like (they) will warm up to the mid-30s and see some of that rain.”
Vermonters across the state are likely to see freezing rain mix on Thursday night, rain on Friday, followed by 1 to 3 inches of snow in the northern mountains at the back end of the storm.
Rain is likely to be accompanied by wind, which, according to Chait at Jay Peak, melts snow faster than almost anything else.
“Think about it like a hair dryer,” he said. “If you brought in a pile of snow and stuck it on the dinner table and watched it melt, that's one thing. If you sprinkle some water on it, it'll melt, but it will also become kind of dense until it meets that critical water content percentage, and then it'll start to flop away. But if you were to take a hair dryer to it, it’ll go fast.”
In the last several years, the changes in weather have prompted many resorts to sink large amounts of money into state-of-the-art snowmaking systems, which can deftly cover large swaths of ski terrain.
It’s helped mountains become more flexible, Chait said.
“I think we really, we just try to stay adaptable, and as things change, we try to change with them,” he said. “We do what we can to roll with the punches and make things as snowy as we can as quickly as we can.”
Drake, at Rikert, remembers hearing about the Vermont Climate Assessment through a story on Vermont Public, which highlighted the shortening of the snow sports season. He felt choked up, he said, thinking about his kids and the future.
“It's such a part of who we are,” he said. “It's in my kids’ blood, and they're not super excited to go skiing because the skiing is not fantastic right now this season. So it's a huge concern of mine.”
