'This is the weather and climate we fear': Climate change and Colorado's ski slopes

Drew Van Patter’s Epic Local Pass isn’t getting much air time this season.

Van Patter, a 32-year-old Fort Collins snowboarder who moved to Colorado five years ago but has frequented the state's ski areas since he was 10 years old, hit the slopes for the fourth time this season in early January.

Like most ski areas in Colorado this season, the runs were icy. Throughout the state, a day of skiing this season has often meant a day spent dodging the grass and rocks peeking from a threadbare blanket of snow.

“It was probably the worst day I’ve had since I lived in Colorado,” Van Patter said of his runs at Breckenridge Ski Resort.

Recent storms offered life support to many of the state's snow-starved ski areas, but as of early January, Colorado's snowpack was lower than it had been in 30 years. Last year was the state’s second-warmest year ever.

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Ski resorts in Colorado, the snow sport stalwart of the nation, will lose millions of dollars this season because of paltry snow and balmy temperatures, one resort leader estimated.

“The whole state is having its worst opening in 20 years,” said Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability for Aspen Snowmass, during a December interview. “This is the weather and climate we fear. It’s already here.”

There will be many more seasons like this as climate change ravages Colorado ski areas, scientists and environmental advocacy groups predict. Recent Environmental Protection Agency research estimates Colorado ski areas will see their already fleeting seasons dwindle by 10 to 50 percent by 2050.

For a 150-day ski season, that means a reduction of between two weeks to nearly three months. By 2090, the EPA estimates some Colorado ski areas will see seasons shortened by as much as 80 percent from present-day levels.

"A lot of people think that climate change is something way in the future that's hard to quantify," said Lindsay Bourgoine, advocacy and campaigns manager for Protect Our Winters. The nonprofit is fighting climate change with support from the outdoors community. "When we start thinking about the millennial generation, this is their grandkids that won't ski."

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The endangerment of the powder day is among the lesser worries of a world imperiled by climate change, Bourgoine said. But it’s one clear way that rising temperatures and unpredictable precipitation patterns are battering Colorado, a state that in recent years has been insulated from major fires and floods.

It's hard to quantify exactly how climate change has affected Colorado ski resorts, particularly because their managers keep a tight grip on data tracking season length and snow-making. Half a dozen ski resorts contacted by the Coloradoan declined to participate in this story or did not respond to requests for interviews and data.

But we know mountain snowpack has decreased 20 to 60 percent at most monitoring sites in Colorado since the 1950s, according to an EPA analysis. We know Colorado's average temperature has increased more than 2 degrees in the last 40 years.

Climate change has gnawed off profitable chunks at the beginning and end of the ski season, said Schendler, who estimated an area needs about 100 days to turn a profit.

"We're seeing these shoulder seasons being squeezed every year," he said. "You get maybe 20 percent of your revenue in the Christmas to New Year's season, and then a big chunk in March for spring break. If you shave off the front and back ends, you no longer have an industry."

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Low snowfall has an immediate impact on skier visits. The marketing group Colorado Ski Country USA, which represents 23 ski areas including Aspen Snowmass and Arapahoe Basin, reported a 13 percent drop in visits between opening day and Dec. 31 compared to the same period last season. Early-season visits last season were down 8 percent from the year before, when heavy snow provided a boost.

Vail Resorts reported an 11 percent decline in early-season visits at its resorts across the United States, which include four Colorado resorts. That followed a 13 percent drop in early visits last year.

Colorado has seen — and bounced back from — winter droughts like this before. Longtime residents might remember the winter of 1976-77, one of Colorado's driest winters on record. The next season saw well-above-average snowfall. But rising temperatures exacerbate cyclical droughts, making them rougher on ski areas, Schendler said.

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Snowmaking can help ski areas get through rough winters, but it requires a Goldilocks-esque recipe of temperature, humidity, wind — and water rights. As temperatures climb, that recipe becomes increasingly elusive.

Lower-elevation ski areas are more vulnerable to temperature increases, which will turn some snow into rain and melt away the snow that does fall. Resorts that don’t have the water rights or equipment for snowmaking won’t be able to supplement nature’s bounty with manmade powder.

"The snow-making is just a stopgap," Schendler said.

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'It's our responsibility to take action now'

Arapahoe Basin Ski Area is one of the only Colorado areas that has been spared from this season’s snow shortfall.

First to open and last to close, Arapahoe Basin is known for having the longest ski season in a state known for long ski seasons. The area has had an average season of 227 days — about seven and a half months — since 2010-11, according to a Coloradoan analysis.

But Arapahoe Basin is also one of the most active resorts in the realm of climate change advocacy. Along with Aspen Snowmass, it's one of two Colorado resorts that partners with Protect Our Winters. Resort employees sport POW logos on their uniforms, and two employees work specifically on sustainability initiatives that include waste diversion, greenhouse gas emissions tracking, solar panels and efficient lighting.

“Even though we’re not as affected as other areas, we still feel it’s our responsibility to take action now,” said Sha Miklas, senior manager of guest services and sustainability. “If Arapahoe Basin survives but everyone down the road doesn’t, that doesn’t do much for us. We need to help the industry as a whole.”

Snow totals: Weekend storm offers life support for Colorado ski areas, mountains

Miklas has pushed sustainability at Arapahoe Basin for about a decade, ever since she created her current position. Progress has been slower than she'd like, but she’s perfected the art of using the bottom line to persuade upper-level management to go green.

Other resorts are trying to fade their carbon footprints. Vail Resorts, which owns Breckenridge, Keystone and Vail ski areas among others, launched a campaign last summer to reduce its resorts' greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2030 and divert all their waste from landfills.

In an email to the Coloradoan, Vail Resorts spokeswoman Rachael Woods declined to "speculate on climate change" but shared information about the zero footprint campaign.

"We’ve set ambitious efficiency targets, and we’ve achieved them by focusing on the big areas of energy use like snowmaking and grooming and in hospitality," she wrote. "But we take a holistic approach to assessing our impact, and we’ve also implemented programs to conserve potable water and to preserve water quality and watersheds in and around our ski areas."

Whittling resort emissions is a start, but it won’t protect the industry from climate change, Miklas and Schendler said. Although ski resorts are uniquely vulnerable to climate change, emissions of even the largest resorts are a pittance compared to your average landfill or university campus.

The true summit for resorts, Miklas and Schendler said, is teaching their patrons to look at nature as a resource that needs to be cherished — not just used.

“How do we get people to correlate that connection they have with nature to sustainability?” Miklas said. “How do we get them to realize that if you don’t care about climate change, you’re going to lose that connection you feel with nature?”

To that end, Aspen Snowmass has adopted a more aggressive approach.

“Do you love your neighbor enough to do something about it?” reads a chairlift ad depicting a snowy mountainside and a URL for POW’s climate advocacy page. Schendler and other resort leaders lobby government officials on climate issues, and the resort’s website includes a page devoted to climate change.

“We got to the point where we asked ourselves, ‘Hey, if you were Aspen (Snowmass), and you legitimately cared about climate change, what would you do?’” Schendler said. “And the answer was very different from what corporate sustainability people do. It wasn’t, ‘Reduce your carbon footprint by 20 percent.’ It was, ‘Figure out where your power lies, where your leverage is, and use that leverage.’

“The focus on yourself is useful in that you can be a model for the rest of the world. But if you stop there, you’re not going to solve the problem.”

What’s missing in the world of climate advocacy is a social movement, Schendler said. All the positive changes in society — labor, women’s suffrage, civil rights — had a movement behind them, but climate change advocacy doesn’t yet, he said.

“The (National Rifle Association) has 5.5 million members,” he said. “REI alone has 6 million members. The outdoors industry could wield power like the NRA, but it never occurred to it to do that.”

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As evidence of the political power wielded by the outdoors industry, Schendler pointed to the splashy public lands debate last month when Patagonia blacked out its homepage with a battle cry of “The President Stole Your Land.”

But protecting public lands is just a start, he said, noting it won’t matter so much who owns the land if it's too hot to be outside.

Schendler isn’t exactly optimistic about the future of the ski industry. He called the prospect of salvaging skiing by 2100 “not really science-based thinking” because global temperatures have increased so much already.

“It’s less about saving the sport,” he said. “You might save chunks of the sport, but it’s really a moral issue. If we’re not willing to take this position, I don’t see who will.”

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Bourgoine, the POW advocacy and campaigns manager, considers that advocacy opportunity a sign of hope.

"To me it’s one of the only industries that can really speak up about the impacts of climate change first-hand," she said. "There’s such an incredible value in telling that story to policymakers. ... I think the outdoors industry is starting to step up to the plate and understand its power."

Editor's note: This story was modified on Friday, Jan. 26, to include a comment from a Vail Resorts representative.

What an 80 percent cut in season length would mean for Colorado resorts

Note: EPA projections estimate many Colorado ski resorts could see seasons shortened by up to 80 percent by 2090. These calculations are meant to give you an idea of how climate change could affect resorts in a worst-case scenario.

Arapahoe Basin, elevation 13,050 feet

Average season length, 2010-17: 7 months, 2 weeks

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 1 month, 2 weeks

Aspen Snowmass, elevation 12,510 feet

Average season length, 2010-17: 4 months, 3 weeks

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 29 days

Copper Mountain, elevation 12,313 feet

Average season length, 2010-17: 5 months, 2 weeks

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 33 days

Crested Butte, elevation 12,162 feet

Average season length, 2010-17: 4 months, 2 weeks

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 27 days

Eldora, elevation 10,800 feet

Average season length, 2010-17: 4 months, 3 weeks

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 29 days

Steamboat, elevation 10,568 feet

Average season length, 2010-17: 4 months, 3 weeks

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 28 days

Vail, elevation 11,570 feet

Average season length, 2010-17: 5 months

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 30 days

Breckenridge, elevation 12,998

Average season length, 2010-17: 5 months, 1 week

Season length with an 80 percent reduction: 32 days

Ski area median snowpacks as of Jan. 17

Steamboat Springs: 63 percent

Aspen: 57 percent

Crested Butte: 64 percent

Telluride: 49 percent

Wolf Creek: 30 percent

Purgatory: 27 percent

Copper Mountain-Breckenridge: 92 percent

Vail-Beaver Creek: 46 percent

Keystone-Arapahoe-Loveland: 104 percent

Source: Natural Resources Conservation Service

Note: The median value represents the amount of snow-water equivalent (how much water the snow becomes when melted down) as a percentage of the historic median value for Jan. 17.