Skiing in a Melting World
By Patrick Thorne
In response to global warming, ski resorts are increasingly going green.
Over the past year the media has been full of stories about climate change, and in particular how the snow sports industry, one of its first victims, will be affected. Most of the reporting has been ill-informed and ill-thought-through, with misinformation and scare-mongering the norm, along with vague warnings coupled with limp advice on what we might do. Not surprising that we don’t know how to proceed. The issue is so complex and the timescale so long, it’s very difficult to predict the way things will go with accuracy. It’s therefore easy for individuals to do nothing and for governments and large corporations to do much less than they should, whilst making it appear they’re doing a lot through clever marketing. So here we will try to get as close as we can to some hard facts.
Are snow sports going to disappear in our lifetime?
The answer here is an (almost) definite “No.” The “almost” is because of a few provisos. The first is that it depends where you live. The world’s highest ski area of Chacaltaya, on a mini-glacier more than 17,000 feet up in Bolivia, is melting fast and is likely to be all gone within the next decade.
The other rather unnerving thing is that Chacaltaya is disappearing more quickly as it gets thinner. The same is true of other, larger glaciers: The melt rate is getting faster.
The second proviso is that it depends to some extent on where you want to ski. Areas that might already be considered marginal for snow cover, like parts of Australia, Arizona, or the Scottish Highlands, are already seeing much less snow on average, and what snow they do get has been projected to have ended completely by the middle of the century. There are a couple of worrying trends of temperatures rising more quickly in some mountain areas, such as the European Alps, than in lower areas, and of the rate of warming accelerating, both of which are clearly bad news for less marginal areas as well.
For high-altitude ski areas, the main trends will be that the snow level will move up the mountain, and the weather will become more unpredictable, with huge snowfalls one day, then warm temperatures and a rapid thaw the next. The huge investment that’s currently going on around the world in snowmaking won’t be much help when it’s too warm to make snow—as was the case in much of Europe’s Alps before Christmas last winter, and in the early weeks of this season for some resorts in Colorado and Utah during a warm snap in November.
But really, unless things get much worse very quickly, we’re going to be able to find snow for the foreseeable future. It’s our children and our children’s children, and their chance of enjoying the snow as we have that we need to worry about.
What can ski resorts do to keep us on their snow?
Although skiers and ski resorts are often accused of bringing global warming upon themselves, the reality is that most ski areas are very environment-friendly and are doing much more than other industries to try to minimize their impact. It is other sectors that contribute the most to the climate changing emissions that threaten snow resorts. It is down to all of us to do much more in our day-to-day lives to reduce emissions and save snow resorts—and indeed, save us all from the other more dramatic consequences of a warming world.
Some resorts are looking at putting lifts higher up the mountains, often controversially, in Engelberg in Switzerland, since it means building in wilderness areas. Whistler Blackcomb is currently completing the spectacular peak-to-peak gondola that will mean snow sports fans can get from one mountaintop to another without needing to venture into the valley.
Whistler Blackcomb
Technology may come to the aid of ski resorts, to some extent. Europe’s highest ski resort, Zermatt, has just bought a remarkable new snowmaking system, manufactured by an Israeli company, that can produce snow at positive temperatures. The resort wants it to fill the gap between the end of its retreating glacier and the bottom of its gondola lift for summer skiers who currently have to hike across the growing space. The Israeli company, IDE, had originally made a cooling system for use in the heat of a South African gold mine, but found a remarkable by product was snow!
Other ideas include putting refrigerated grids beneath the ground to cool it down so snow doesn’t melt so fast. Some resorts, including Franz Klammer’s hometown of Bad Kleinkkrchheim in Austria, have considered putting a giant roof over a slope to create a huge version of an urban indoor snow center like Ski Dubai, which operates even when outdoor temperatures pass 100 degrees F.
There are more than 50 of these indoor snow temples in existence or development around the world with the first in North America, Xanadu, opening at Meadowlands, New Jersey, next year. Although slopes are typically 800 feet long, some slopes in Europe have reached nearly 2,000 feet, and plans are in place for slopes double that length to be built indoors—so they keep getting bigger and better.
What are resorts doing to combat climate change?
Ski resorts around the world are doing literally thousands of different things to try to reduce their carbon footprints. With power bills—in most cases their major cost after employee wages—rising fast, it makes economic as well as environmental sense to use less. Snowmaking world champion Killington in Vermont has a program of retrofitting its snowmaking capabilities with low-energy snow guns. To the north, its neighbor SugarloafUSA in Maine is recycling used cooking fat into biodiesel for resort vehicles; to the south, Jiminy Peak resort in Massachusetts has installed possibly the world’s largest privately owned wind turbines to contribute a big chunk of its own energy requirements. At the last count, more than 60 U.S. ski areas offset all or most of their energy consumption by buying into the power grid an amount of green energy equivalent to that which they consume. Vail Resorts which runs Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Vail in Colorado as well as Heavenly in California, is North America’s second-largest private buyer of green power.
In Europe too, resorts are doing ever more. Countries like Norway, Austria, and France have always had a environment-friendly ethos. These countries have always received the majority of their national power from renewable sources, are usually accessible by rail, and have always gone for maximum power efficiency just to keep warm indoors! The luxurious Badrutt’s Palace hotel in St. Moritz has gone further than most, though, by installing a ground source heat pump in the resort’s famous lake. As a result, more than 100,000 gallons of heating oil that used to arrive by road is no longer required and 1,344 tons less CO2 is produced. Plus, the famous lake stays frozen longer for those vital champagne-soaked polo matches and horse races on ice.
St. Moritz is doing much more. There are solar panels up the side of its funicular railway soaking up the 322 sunshine days a year, as well as a small wind turbine. Even the local dairy is now recycling 4,000 tons of waste that used to be trucked away across the Alps but is now converted into 280,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity instead.
The target now for St. Moritz, as far as some of the resort’s movers and shakers are concerned at least, is to become completely carbon-neutral within the next decade.
Another example is the world’s largest ski area, the French Three Valleys, which, like Vail and Aspen, uses 100 percent green power for its lifts and snowmaking, and biodiesel in its groomers.
Of course, the industry cannot rest on its laurels since it is at the same time installing ever more power- and water-hungry snow guns. However, it’s fair to say that initiatives are becoming increasingly impressive and effective.
And what can we do?
Buy less power, buy green power, use more power-efficient machinery, waste less, buy local, travel as fuel-efficiently as you can. You get the picture—we all just need to consume less and consume more efficiently. A lot of the time, it’s pretty easy. We just need to think differently until it becomes a habit. The good news: We also save money, and if we cycle or walk for short journeys when we previously drove, we get fitter ahead of that next ski trip.
Peter Thorne is a leading advocate for the use of green practices in the ski industry.
Posted on January 29, 2007