A Skier’s Guide to Climate Change: Enjoy It for Now

Thanks to record snowfalls, five North American ski resorts remain open. California’s Mammoth Mountain doesn’t plan to idle its chairlifts until sometime in August, only a couple of months shy of its planned opening day for the 2019/2020 season. Yes, snow sports in the Northern Hemisphere have almost lapped the calendar. 

Consequently, the ski industry, a $8.4 billion business in North America, has swung from existential crisis to sanguine in a matter of months, booking an epic run of business incongruous with the dire fallout from climate change.

“As they say, it’s better to be lucky than smart,” says Rusty Gregory, chief executive officer of Alterra Mountain Co., which owns 13 ski resorts in the U.S. and Canada. “It was certainly a good year to be CEO.”

All told, skiers and snowboarders collectively spent 59 million days on a U.S. mountain this past season, an 11% increase from the prior period and the most traffic that resorts have seen in almost a decade, according to the National Ski Areas Association. The piles of ski money were spread far and wide and were inordinately harvested by Alterra and its chief rival, Vail Resorts Inc., which owns 20 resorts.

From November through April, Vail recorded 13.7 million skier days on its mountains, a 20% increase over the year-earlier period. Total revenue in that time surged 14.5 percent, to $1.8 billion. “The snow is great in terms of getting people in the mood,” says Vail CEO Rob Katz. “And it’s not just about the powder skiing; it’s just magical to be around.”

Alterra, as a private company, keeps its finances under wraps. However, Gregory says the company posted record visitation and revenue at all but one of its resorts. “It almost seems like I’m making it up, but I’m not,” he says. 

At times, in fact, there was too much winter. In February, California resorts were forced to close over one of the season’s busiest weekends when they were buried in up to 11 feet of snow in four days. Alterra, meanwhile, grappled with a public backlash over long lift lines and crowded mountains. 

Ironically, powder hounds may have climate change to thank, at least in part. Cameron Wobus, a senior scientist at Lynker Technologies, says a polar weather system dipped south and essentially froze in place this year, spinning a parade of storms across America. It’s not unusual for a band of cold air to drop south; what’s strange, according to Wobus, is that it didn’t wiggle around like a loose garden hose. “This type of thing is totally consistent with what you’d expect to see from climate change,” he explains. As a scientist, Wobus says, he found the snow sobering. As a skier, well, there was a silver lining: He spent 30 days on the slopes.

In a 2017 study, Wobus, along with the University of Colorado and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, found that over the next 30 years climate change may make for longer ski seasons at 10 or so U.S. resorts. “Basically, precipitation goes up with temperature,” Wobus explains. “But in a lot of places , if it gets a degree or two warmer, it’s still cold enough to snow.” Winter, in short, will be more wintry in certain places.

Meanwhile, spring in America this year stayed relatively chill. Skiers enjoyed a near-perfect-storm cycle—the best parts of climate change with few of the bad symptoms. 

Breckenridge, in the heart of the Colorado Rockies, pushed its closing day back twice and finally switched the lifts off for good on June 9. Back east, Killington closed just a few days earlier. Mad River Glen, a Vermont cooperative that doesn’t make snow at all, was open for 136 days, its longest season in the 70 years it has operated.

On the first day of summer, the mountains of Colorado were piled with a further 20 inches of snow, frosting on a gluttonous cake. On July 4, skiers at Arapahoe Basin will be wearing Hawaiian shirts and gliding on nearly four feet of snowpack.

Euphoria is still running high and quickly metabolizing into another financial narcotic: optimism. Parlor Skis, the largest ski maker in New England, quickly sold out places in its summer workshop, in which customers build their own skis for $1,500. At Vail, Colo., pass sales for the upcoming ski season are up 9% in terms of units. Peak Resorts, which owns 16 destinations, including New York’s Hunter Mountain, has seen a 21% increase in season pass sales for the 2019/2020 period. 

“We certainly had more ups than downs this winter,” says Jesse Boyd, vice president of operations. “But our customers are pretty resilient. … They know we can recover, even if the weather isn’t perfect. 

If science is any guide, the recent season may be hard to top—the good old days. Conditions will almost certainly worsen from here. By 2050, about one-third of U.S. ski resorts will have lost more than half of their season, according to the University of Colorado study.

Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit advocacy group, has been trying to get the skiing community to lobby more aggressively for a policy agenda, including a carbon tax and renewable mandates for electric utilities. To date, it has had more success with athletes—professional skiers and snowboarders—than with executives, according to Executive Director Mario Molina.

Raising alarms on climate change, he realizes, has the potential to spook investors and guests. “The ski industry is in a tough position,” Molina says. “And I don’t know if it has fully internalized the scope of the impact.”

At the moment, the industry is squarely focused on hacking Mother Nature, making enough man-made snow for resorts to open earlier in the fall and stay open later in the spring. Alterra will spend $8.3 million in the next few months on guns and hoses for painting its slopes white. “In this business, you kind of live and die by these weather cycles,” Gregory at Alterra explains. “We had a great year, but  I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the pendulum is going to swing.”

Vail said it will spend up to $180 million on capital improvements by the time lifts start turning, much of it on snowmaking machines in Colorado. It plans to open its eponymous mountain in mid-November, a week earlier than usual, though it is also investing heavily in zip lines, rope courses, and other summer activities. “What we’re planning for is weather variability,” Katz said. “We have to have a business and a guest experience that can we can deliver on, regardless of snowfall.”

Both Alterra and Vail, ever eager to hedge weather risk, are thinking about selling all-you-can-ski passes that will span more than one season. For the consumers, the odds are decent that one of the winters will be a good one; if not, perhaps they will be interested in a trip to Australia or Japan. 

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.