This commentary is by Charlotte Stevens, a junior at Stowe High School who loves to ski at her local mountain, especially with her school’s alpine team.
Just one week before the ski resort in my hometown of Stowe was set to open, temperatures reached above 70 degrees, unheard of for early November in the Northeast.
But the following week, Stowe Mountain Resort’s social media pages boasted about 160 snow guns taking full advantage of the more ideal temperatures, a last-ditch attempt to accumulate enough trail coverage for Friday’s scheduled opening day.
The efforts of Vermont’s ski community are strong, but Mother Nature seems to be saying no.
It is undeniable that the planet is warming, and human activity is the cause of it — just look at Vermont’s rise in average winter temperatures over the last 50 years. The burning of fossil fuels through manmade technologies creates extra energy by way of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If current trends continue, our planet will experience warming by almost 7°F in the 21st century.
This trend is the reason why the ski industry is imperiled. As someone who has grown up on New England’s peaks, it’s hard to admit, but skiing is a dying sport. Long lift lines and crowded slopes of top resorts may seem to say otherwise, but it’s true. Skiing, a sport dependent in part on cold winters, can’t sustain itself in a warming world.
Jonathan Winter, a climate researcher at Dartmouth College, says the northeastern U.S. could see a 50% decline in snowfall by mid-century. The fact is, our winters are getting shorter. And we can see climate change’s effects on the ski industry through a number of resort closures in the past year alone.
In 2010, the small Ascutney ski area in southern Vermont stopped its lifts for the final time, unable to continue running due to a lack of snow in recent years (although Ascutney Outdoors now runs a T-bar with limited hours on that hill; it serves eight trails).
According to the New England Lost Ski Areas Project, Ascutney is one of 604 mountain resorts that have closed in the Northeast. Many more have had to shorten their seasons; the U.S. has seen an average decline in season length of 34 days and 41% less snow cover from 1982 to 2016.
But the climate issue in the ski industry affects more than just the number of on-snow days a skier gets a season. After the Ascutney ski resort closed, the nearby town of West Windsor felt the economic effects greatly. Glenn Seward, an employee of the resort for 18 years, said, “Property values plummeted, condos on the mountain saw their value decrease by more than half, and taxes went up.” Tourists stopped arriving, locals lost jobs, and West Windsor shut its beloved general store for financial reasons. Ascutney’s closing proved devastating for the entire community.
Unlike my local mountain, Stowe, owned by Vail Resorts Inc., an $11 billion publicly traded ski industry conglomerate, it’s small resorts like Ascutney, and the many others scattered across New England, that don’t have the funds to sustain themselves amidst climate factors working against winter. Meanwhile, the growing carbon footprint the surviving mountain resorts are creating is grossly ironic.
Resorts such as Vail rely mostly on fossil fuels to satisfy their incredible energy demands. Elaborate snowmaking systems are used to make winter come earlier and last longer. These snow guns pull from nearby water sources, often requiring 100 gallons of water per minute per snow gun.
The power needed to run one ski lift for a month is the same as 3.8 households for a year. Trail groomers requiring diesel are deployed nightly. The list of energy consumers goes on.
Vail talks about moving to zero net emissions, but so far it is mostly lip-service: 60% of its electric generation still comes from coal-fired plants, one of the worst contributors of greenhouse gases.
Currently, the Ski & Snowboard Resorts industry in the U.S., valued at $4.28 billion, is standing on a slippery slope. The market size is built on short-term profits. Ski resort operators are more focused on instant gratification than long-term sustainability — lacking the courage for lobbying and politicking for climate, unconcerned with the fact that they are mortgaging their own future.
The fate of our winters lies in the hands of billion-dollar companies, and they seem to be destroying it. If the industry isn’t willing to save itself, who is?
The U.S. ski community is nearly 15 million members strong — a large, affluent and passionate group with the buyer power and potential to help accelerate the industry’s transition to renewable energy. For a group with a large stake in the issue, it’s shocking that so little has been done. The climate crisis that is very soon going to leave us with no snow needs to be acted upon.
It is the role of outdoor enthusiasts to call out large corporations on their fallacious green campaigns and demand visible change. Through the collaboration of vocal individuals, let’s band together to lobby state and national legislatures and raise the current standards of climate policies and initiatives.
If not to protect the treasured winter sports culture, to keep mountainside chalets with ski-in ski-out value, then at least to save Earth from ultimate self-destruction.
