Northwest skiers worried their grandkids won’t be able to find snow
Mar 2, 2015, 2:17 PM | Updated: 11:02 pm
(Image from Top of Alpental webcam)
Our dismal snow pack this year has powder junkies wondering if the Pacific Northwest’s ski industry is forever melting before our eyes.
One group of pro-athletes believes it could be. They say they are fighting to save the future of snow.
Ingrid Backstrom is an internationally renowned freeskier, probably the most successful female big mountain skier in the world.
Related: Dismal ski season taking toll on local snow-dependent businesses
She travels the globe in search of year-round snow. Currently her team is in the Lofoten Islands of Norway.
“We have just been ski touring and hiking, it’s beautiful,” she said. “Next up, I’m headed to Vladivostok Russia, taking the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia and hoping to find some skiing along the way.”
Before her globetrotting career began, this winter sports superstar grew up in Normandy Park going to Crystal Mountain with her parents. She said Pacific Northwest snow was great preparation for a professional career.
“You get used to skiing in any conditions, which is really good for making you a lifelong skier,” Backstrom laughed.
Today, however, she is worried the Cascade skiing of her youth might be a thing of the past.
In her travels, Backstrom said she heard the concerns of locals all over the world impacted by rising temperatures. Inuit people on Baffin Island told her about their struggles hunting and fishing on melting ice. In Greenland, locals were distraught over their plunging polar bear population. And skiers in Backstrom’s own backyard are seeing their way of life disrupted.
“The winters we’ve had this year and last year in the Northwest, and my friends in Tahoe, this is their fourth winter in a row that there hasn’t been great skiing,” she explained.
“It’s a bummer to not be able to ski, but it’s really sad for people who depend on that type of tourism, and snowboarding, for their livelihoods.”
Porter Fox, features editor for Powder Magazine, spent the past few years researching his latest book, “Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow.”
“We’ve lost a million square miles of spring snow pack in the Northern hemisphere. That’s in the last 45 years,” he said. “Europe has lost half its glacial ice in the Alps in the last 150 years or so. Twenty percent of that since the 1980s.”
Fox’s book takes a look at how climate change could spell the end of winter sports, especially in the Northwest.
“They’re talking about by mid-century, the Cascades, the Sierras holding forty-percent less snow pack,” Fox explained.
In the course of research, Fox visited ski resorts in Europe decimated by warming, where park-goers have to take lifts to get down hills because they can’t ski all the way to the bottom.
“It’s incredibly shocking to see. For the folks who are living up in the mountains, it’s radically changing their lifestyle, their water supply, every facet of life for them,” he observed.
Snow-based recreation in the United States is estimated to contribute $67-billion annually to the U.S. economy and supports over 900,000 jobs.
Fox reports the American ski industry lost over a billion dollars between 1999 and 2010 because of disappointing snow years. It cost the industry up to 27,000 jobs.
Washington was one of the hardest hit during that span, losing 28 percent of skier visits. Fox said that’s 1.6 million people not flying in to stay, eat, buy gear, and carve powder at local mountain resorts.
Fox believes the impact on the ski industry is bringing more people around to an issue they previously ignored as a debate between scientists or a problem for future generations.
“Now that they’re seeing it, people are saying, “What are we going to do?””
Backstrom is part of one organization taking action. Protect Our Winters was founded in 1997 by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones. It’s an advocacy group mobilizing the winter sports community to fight climate change.
The group’s latest target is millions of tons of coal on its way from the Powder River Basin to Puget Sound ports.
Porter Fox argued this would essentially be shipping America’s coal problem to Asia.
“It doesn’t matter where you burn the coal. The effect is the same for everybody around the planet,” he said.
Protect Our Winters has just made a documentary on the issue, “Momenta,” available online. It argues the impact on the climate of the Powder River coal train project would be greater than that of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Despite the shrinking ski runs, shortened seasons, and melting profits at resorts worldwide, Backstrom believes it’s not too late to slow the warming trend.
“Mountains and snow have been such an important part of my life. I can’t imagine not having that around for our kids and our grandkids to enjoy and make their livings around,” she said.
“There is a very good chance that we can nip this in the bud, slow down the momentum of climate change, and keep mountains and snow very similar to how they are today,” Fox said.
According to Backstrom, Protect Our Winters is not trying to villainize companies or eco-bully people.
Her goal and that of her fellow athletes is to encourage everyone to experience the beauty of the mountains. She thinks action will then come naturally.
“Care about the beautiful places and want to protect that snow, and those fun times,” Backstrom said.