FLAGSTAFF — Winter arrived in darkness.

It was the first day of ski season, just past 5 a.m., and the only light came from John Nichols' snowcat tractor. Everything the headlights touched was snow. Powder floated through the air. Thick clumps of snow stuck to the tractor blade, popped against the heated windshield and started to melt.

"It's feeling a lot more like winter this year," Nichols said. He drove forward and smoothed out a wide ski trail. Then he made a hard left, headed downhill to find another pile of snow.

The headlights shone across the slopes, and then it was clear: A few feet away, the snow stopped. Ski-lift chairs dangled above brown grass. Aspen and ponderosa pine trees stretched upward, but nothing fell from the sky.

The mountain's only snow was manufactured, blown into existence by rows of metal machines.

"There's just bare ground around," Nichols said. "None of this is natural.”

As the effects of climate change intensify, Flagstaff's snow-covered natural winters have started to melt. The city still sees bursts of snow — a few inches fell over the first weekend of December — but the heavy winters of Nichols’ childhood are becoming rarer. In their place has come a new existence, one with warmer temperatures, a shrinking snowpack and a question that's rippling through the city:

If Flagstaff loses its winter identity, what’s left?

Nobody has the answer yet.

READ MORE: Climate change means less snow in some places

Environmentalists predict irreversible damage to a fragile ecosystem. Hotel and ski shop owners work in fear of another dry winter. The mayor worries about a rush of “climate refugees” and climate change’s impact on the poor and elderly. And longtime locals, already frustrated by rising rents and their small town’s boundless growth, fret that the city will never be the same.

“We're going to end up where we're just not going to be a snow destination," said Joe Shannon, a retired Northern Arizona University ecology professor and Sierra Club member who’s lived in Flagstaff for 32 years. “And people are struggling to come to terms with that."

Nichols heard the talk about climate change. But he just wanted to ski. He grew up in Flagstaff, playing soccer in the summers and spending all winter on the mountain, and never left. The furthest he’s lived from home were the dorms of NAU, where he studied mechanical engineering and realized Flagstaff was bigger than high school made it feel. Then he bought a house two miles from his parents.

Now he’s 25 years old, an engineer by training who oversees snowmaking at the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort, responsible for creating winter when nature won’t.

The company started making its own snow in 2012, hoping to stabilize an unpredictable business.Management said the looming threat of climate change didn’t factor into the decision. But during last year's dry season, the resort made more snow than ever before.

Nichols would ski on anything but still wants to see snowflakes fall. Real snow, he said, makes Flagstaff feel normal. But by Snowbowl's opening day, Nov. 16,it had snowed only twice. Most of that was gone. The day's forecast showed a high of 52 degrees. There were no storms in sight.

“We’re creating winter in our own way,” he said now, finishing off another cup of coffee. Country music jangled softly from his phone. A pair of sunglasses bounced on the bill of his Snowbowl hat, which couldn’t quite cover a mess of dark skier’s curls. He brushed them back and drove toward another pile of snow. Ahead of him, turquoise light crept over Humphreys Peak.

The ski season started in three hours. Nichols smoothed piles of machine-made snow into loose pathways, working his way up the mountain. The season’s first skiers started to arrive. Nichols checked the weather on his phone: 32.8 degrees.

And then it was morning.

Nichols sat on a thin trail of snow, with brown grass on either side. He turned around and headed back downhill. There were dry aspens to his right and skinny ponderosa pines everywhere else. Ahead of him, a haze of smoke drifted over the valley.

Behind him, the snow guns were still running. Humphreys Peak was fully lit now, showing a few patches of natural snow.

Somewhere up there, Flagstaff’s real winter ended and the new, artificial one began. But the line was impossible to see.

'Flagstaff is on the edge'

The first time Tom Mackin saw Flagstaff, it felt like home.

He and his cat drove through in 1969, pulling a U-Haul trailer down old Route 66. They were moving from New York to California. “Just passing through,” he remembered, but in Flagstaff, he found everything he could want: snowy mountains and thick forests, wide public lands and a busy downtown, weather that seemed nice enough. I could do this, he decided that day, and 15 years, later, he moved to Flagstaff.

Already the city felt different. It was a little bigger, a little louder, a little more expensive. Tourists came in bunches. The university started to sprawl. Flagstaff’s once-vital logging industry all but collapsed. But it held onto everything he liked.

Then he noticed things started to shift.

“The changes, I think, have been dramatic,” Mackin said.

Mackin had moved onto Arizona’s front line of climate change, where subtle differences have hinted at devastating consequences. Last year was Coconino County's warmest on record, and Flagstaff's temperatures keep threatening to break 100 degrees for the first time. Entire sections of the forest are dying. And the four seasons that Flagstaffians hold so dear have started to blur at the edges.

Flagstaff’s way of life depends on heavy layers of snow. The snow protects the iconic ponderosa pine forests and, when it melts, provides part of the city’s water supply. The ski resort pumps $40 million and hundreds of jobs into the local economy. Snow lets the city, which takes pride in its oddities, stand apart from its desert surroundings. It's even on the city's official crest: In the background, dark-green mountains feature little streaks of white.

Now nobody can predict how long it’ll keep snowing.

“My strong sense is that Flagstaff is on the edge,” said Bruce Hungate, a professor of biological sciences at NAU. “That change in snowpack and snow level might be enough to change the wintertime character of the city.”

Mackin, who spends most of his time volunteering with various environmental groups, has already seen that character change. There were the lakes, and the aspen trees that keep dying, and his favorite camping spot, near Kendrick Mountain, that a forest fire burned away. As that fire spread, he sat in his truck and wiped away tears, knowing nothing would ever be the same.

READ MORE: In Flagstaff, restoring forests to prevent fire and disaster

He's thought about leaving, about admitting defeat and moving somewhere else. Maybe Oregon or Colorado. But nowhere else offered everything that drew him to Flagstaff, and he's 72 years old now.

It might be too late to start over.

On a cool November morning, Mackin started his Chevy pickup and drove south, curving out of Flagstaff and into the ponderosas, headed toward Upper Lake Mary. Fifteen miles later, the line of trees broke, the earth fell away, and everything in sight was brown. The lake had dried into a field of crackling dirt.

Mackin parked and followed footprints down the banks. He used to love the lake, passing warm summer days on a friend’s boat, drifting around but headed nowhere in particular. This was where people paddleboarded and fished for northern pike. But now it was dry.

Just a few years ago, Mackin remembered, water stretched in all directions. The lake rises and falls every year.

“This may be some of the worst I’ve seen here,” he said. He walked over a line of stones and onto the lake bed. Each step kicked dirt into the air. The sun had baked footprints into the ground. Shards of clamshells were scattered everywhere. The only water was a thin stripe of ice in the center. He joked that Snowbowl’s machines could fix it.

He stood in a dry lake and spun in a slow circle, taking in everything Flagstaff stood to lose. It was beautiful in a bleak way. He saw a woman and her dog walk out onto the dried earth. He saw a truck parked where there used to be water. And in the distance, he saw a blackened patch of forest, where ponderosa trunks lay broken and jagged.

There was a fire a few years ago, and the trees still haven’t grown back.

A plan for what comes next

Coral Evans just wanted snow on Christmas.

It had come every year, ever since she was a little girl. If it didn’t fall on Christmas Day, there was at least snow on the ground, and that was good enough. But last year, the temperature topped 50 degrees, warm enough that she considered grilling Christmas steaks. There was no snow in sight.

“I was just so sad,” Evans said. “I’m just saying that you’re definitely wondering where the snow is.”

She grew up here, a third-generation Flagstaffian in a family she now realizes was poor. The climate was her childhood: In the winters, she was the only girl on her ice hockey team, playing on one of the city’s frozen lakes. In the summer, she ate fish from those lakes and played in the creek behind the house her grandfather built.

Now she’s the Mayor of Flagstaff, the mother of a fourth-generation local. Signs of change are everywhere.

Evans lives in her grandfather's house, but the creek is gone. So are most of the city's lakes. This summer, the temperature hit 96 degrees, and Evans recently discovered that the little bumps on her arms were from mosquito bites.

"I didn't even know we had mosquitoes," she said.

New fears filled her mind. She worried about a fire that could destroy the city and a drought that could leave it withering away, a mass migration of people fleeing unlivable Phoenix summers. She wondered if the city’s infrastructure could hold up, and how the city’s poor and elderly would survive.

But mostly she dreaded a Flagstaff that didn't feel like home.

"How are we going to adapt to make sure that we don’t lose the sense of place, the sense of identity, what it is that we like about Flagstaff?" she said.

The city had a plan.

City officials held town halls and community meetings, taking notes as residents described the changes they were seeing. People noticed their gardens were growing strangely. They complained that there were more bugs than usual. Had anybody else noticed how many apples grew this year? People fretted about hot summers and utility bills that stacked up and the smoke that wafted in from California.

It all led to the Flagstaff Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, a 156-page document that focused on adapting to climate change, not stopping it, because some things were already gone.

“To protect what we love about this town,” Evans wrote in the introduction, “we need to ensure that we are prepared for change.”

In November, the plan went before the City Council.

It passed unanimously.

What history shows

This has happened before.

A thousand years before Flagstaff existed, the Sinagua tribe ruled the forest. They came from what's now northeastern Arizona and settled below the mountains, where they built prosperous farms. They thrived in the cool, wet climate.

Then that climate changed. Starting around the 14th century, the Verde Valley became a little warmer, a little drier. Weather swung from one extreme to the next. The Sinagua couldn't change quickly enough.

“They weren’t able to adapt to the warmer, drier conditions,” said NAU professor R. Scott Anderson, who teaches a class on historical ecology. “And their societies just fell apart.”

All that’s left are the ruins.

A roller-coaster ride

Brian Dierker felt like celebrating.

Earlier that morning, he opened his ski shop's second location, timing it perfectly with Snowbowl's opening day. This year's ski season came sooner than anybody expected, which soothed nerves across the city. So even though it was 11 a.m., and a customer was about to choose a pair of boots, Dierker slipped out the back door and headed to the bar.

Downtown, at the Rendezvous, Dierker ordered a spicy Bloody Mary. Then he spun on his barstool and stared out a wide picture window.

“You want it to snow,” Dierker said at the bar. His voice was deep and rattling. “But anybody that’s been here a long time, it’s always been kind of a roller-coaster ride of conditions.”

Dierker, 63, had ridden that roller-coaster all his life. He was born in Flagstaff and raised on the mountains, growing into a massive man who called skiing "my religion." Owning a ski shop was the closest thing to actually being out there, so he opened Humphreys Summit Ski and became an institution.

His business is among the city's most vulnerable. In good years, Flagstaff's ski shop owners hoard profits. During dry spells, like last year's barren winter, all they can do is hope for snow. The young owner of Ski Haus, a shop just down the street, said only Snowbowl's snowmaking machines kept them afloat last year. There may be no way to survive another season that dry.

Still, Dierker stayed. He couldn't see himself anywhere else.

He always said he'd leave Flagstaff if he had to, but can't see why he would. The city had everything he could want: Family, friends, an easy drive to the Colorado River, enough new restaurants to satisfy his foodie wife.

But a small part of him wondered what Flagstaff had become. Snowbowl’s metal machines promised stability, but it was impossible to ignore the creeping effects of climate change. He knew the temperatures rising and assumed the heavy winters of his childhood were gone. He kept spotting new faces in town. Young money flooded the downtown square. He found himself worrying about Flagstaff's mountain-town culture.

“Too many people,” he said. “It’ll just take away the joy of the small town. Strangle it.”

With that, he finished his drink, snapped off a piece of celery and headed back to his truck. A half-full Modelo was wedged in the front seat. An empty one rattled in the back. The radio played softly. Dierker pulled out and pointed the truck toward his shop.

The traffic was heavy. The sky was clear. Dierker made a right, then another, and now Humphreys Peak rose in the distance. From the city, it looked brown and barren, but the other side, he knew, was covered in snow.

“Hell, we’ll have a good winter,” he said. “I feel it in my bones.”

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