Aspen Mountain may not receive the biggest snow totals in the West, but it’s nevertheless one of the heaviest-weight ski spots. On powder days, you can find those in the know — probably not the politicians, celebrities, and corporate executives who flew in on Gulfstream G150s — riding the FIS chairlift up to a region known as the Dumps. There, snow covers old mine debris, the environmental destruction having created steep slopes now covered in the mountain’s namesake trees that black-diamonders slalom through on their way to blindingly white fields of fluff. This area of Aspen Snowmass, a conglomerate resort that encompasses four mountains, gets some of the best snow during big winter storms. But when that snow comes, and how much drops, is changing.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, April snowpack measured at monitoring sites across Colorado has dropped by 20 to 60 percent since the 1950s. The state is, on average, two degrees balmier than it was 30 years ago, according to a 2014 report. In March 2017, the Audi FIS Alpine Skiing World Cup finals happened at Aspen Snowmass. It was 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Intrepid organizers poured heavy salt on the runs to keep them runnable.
Aspen is far from the only ski town feeling the climate crisis as a threat to its bottom line — let alone an existential threat for a business reliant on snow — but Aspen Skiing Company was one of the first resort operators to start shouting about climate change from the proverbial mountaintops. Officials at the resort want their customers to notice the shorter winters and rising temperatures, and to talk about all those changes. They want you to say the words “climate change,” and, most importantly, to do something about it.
The sustainability initiatives of Skico, as the company is locally known, are headed by a guy named Auden Schendler. Since 1999, Schendler has worked to put some power back in the hands of patrons who might otherwise feel overwhelmed by the enormity of a warming world. Skico, under Schendler’s leadership, has embarked on numerous projects intended to make a difference, to let people make their own differences, and to catalyze action more significant than either the resort or its downhillers can muster alone.
Schendler, whose face has the clean, patrician lines of a politician, got into sustainability in part because he didn’t like environmental aspects of where he was raised. “I grew up in New Jersey,” he said, “and it was gross.” This was around the time the Clean Air and Clean Water acts were being implemented, and the need for them was obvious. In 1969, for instance, the amount of bacteria in the Hudson River was 170 times the safe limit; in 1972, when the Clean Water Act was passed, it was estimated two-thirds of the nation’s waterways were too dirty for safe swimming or fishing. As The New York Times put it in a 2017 article about the time, “you could touch the air in New York. It was that filthy.”
When Schendler visited family out West, it changed his view of what the world was, and also what it could be. “I wanted to be out in the West, and I wanted to be outside,” he said.
Schendler flitted around for a while before settling into his work at Aspen. “I was kind of a ski-town dirtbag trying to survive,” he said. “I cooked burgers. I lived in a double-wide with five people.” He interned at High Country News, an environment-focused publication in Colorado; he insulated low-income housing to make it more efficient; he worked on corporate sustainability at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank headquartered in Basalt.
That work pushed Schendler toward where he is now, but he still had to be in the right place at the right time — the right place being Aspen, the right time being 1999, soon after Skico’s then-CEO Pat O’Donnell, former head of Patagonia, introduced an environmental affairs office that would grow to take on an ambitious suite of climate, housing, jobs, and human rights initiatives. “Ours was the first sustainability department in the industry,” Schendler said, “and I was the second guy.”
Earlier in Schendler’s tenure, the department focused mostly on resort-level engineering challenges. They built LEED-certified buildings, retrofitted boilers, installed LED bulbs and a small solar array. Later, Aspen helped build a 147 kilowatt solar array in nearby Carbondale. Skico tried their mills at wind power, sourced local food, and constructed a small hydroelectric plant on Snowmass Mountain.
But Schendler now thinks beyond one-off projects, focusing, too, on long-term policy and setting a followable example. “The core mission of my work,” he said, “is to try to figure out how to wield power on climate — how to take effective action versus token action.”
In 2012, Skico invested $5.4 million in a plant that captures the waste methane from a nearby coal mine and turns it into electricity, which the company then sells to the local utility. It’s a partnership between the oil and gas industry, a rural utility company, and a skiing giant, and something that may inspire other unlikely alliances of the same sort.
Campaigns to influence policy, Schendler saw, didn’t just look good in press releases — they had a larger, more lasting impact than just upgrading one boiler room or putting solar panels on a rooftop. He has come to believe that leveraging political power is the most effective weapon against climate change. And his position in Aspen, a haven for the political elite drawn by events like the Aspen Ideas Festival and, generally, by the town’s luxurious setting, put Schendler in a unique position to effect change beyond Aspen Snowmass’ borders.
Researchers have been assessing just how changing weather patterns will affect, and have already affected, the mountains down which skiers and snowboarders make turns. Physicist Philip Mote, for instance, has conducted long-term studies of snowpack to understand how the present differs from the past, so we can understand how change might play out in the future.
Mote’s journey started in the fall of 1986, when he took an atmospheric science class. A hole had recently opened up above Antarctica in the ozone layer, a section of the stratosphere that absorbs ultraviolet light. Scientists soon showed that the chlorofluorocarbons — CFCs — in refrigerator and aerosol chemicals were eating the ozone for breakfast.
“I remember thinking, How on Earth is it possible that humans are such a force that everyday life in North America has created this problem over Antarctica?” Mote said. It was the first time that many other humans thought that same thing, and one of the first times Earth’s residents took action to protect themselves from themselves: In 1987, the United Nations finalized the Montreal Protocol, phasing out the atmosphere-attacking CFCs (it’s now been ratified by all member nations). Not long after, the ozone hole began to shrink.
Seeing a human-caused problem and solution has informed Mote’s research career ever since. Mote now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he’s a researcher, vice provost, and dean at Oregon State University. His work has shown that dwindling snow presents a concern more severe than fickle ski seasons. Out here, he said, as opposed to the rainy eastern U.S., “snow is the primary form of water storage.”
Last year, Mote published an analysis of changes in spring snowpack in the West between 1955 and 2018, updating estimates he’d first published in 2005. When he began that initial research, he wasn’t expecting to see much of a decline in the white stuff. “I honestly thought, Well, it’s only warmed about 1 degree. I probably won’t find anything,” he said. That wasn’t the case back then, and it certainly isn’t the case now. In his recent survey, published in Nature, Mote found that the average amount of water in April 1 snowpack has dropped by about 9.5 trillion gallons since midcentury — an amount that could, roughly, fill Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the U.S., with a trillion gallons leftover. “I got this number and thought, Wait, that can’t be right,” he said. In sum, more than 90 percent of the sites he surveyed saw snowpack declines since 1955.
When there’s less snowpack, there’s less water available when farms, municipalities, and fish need it. And — for ski resorts — Mote’s research implies shorter seasons, earlier springs. The industry also faces less money during typically lucrative holidays, and lower-elevation resorts could wind up without much snow at all.
Dry winters take a toll. Colorado Ski Country USA, the state’s ski industry association, found that early-season visits in 2017, a below-average snow year, had fallen by 13 percent from the year before. A 2018 economic report from climate awareness group Protect Our Winters (Schendler’s on its board of directors) compared snowfall data with skier visits from 2001 to 2016. The group found that, during the five years in that span with the lowest snowfall, fewer skiers meant $1 billion in lost revenue and 17,400 fewer jobs compared with the average ski season.
That same report describes a scary scene in California, when Sierra-at-Tahoe officials went old-school to keep themselves in snow. “We were taking snow literally out of the trees, putting it on our run, and doing our best with our grooming to make sure that snow would stay,” Steven Hemphill, director of marketing and sales, said in the report.
So for skiers, yeah, the near future is scary. But it’s not totally bleak. Sometimes, Mote gives a talk called “Should you teach your kids to ski?” Yes, is the tl;dr answer — but as they grow up, they’ll probably have to travel farther than you did. “There will be fewer functioning ski resorts,” he said. In dry climates, snowmaking can stand up the difference. And many resorts, especially in places like Colorado, are high enough that they’ll stay in business even through warmer winters.
“If they were fine in 2015” — a particularly warm, dry year — “they’ll probably be fine for a few decades,” Mote said. Beyond that, some resorts may have to admit they can’t take it anymore. At Truckee, California — a jumping-off point for the ski areas around Lake Tahoe, visitors starting around 2080 might see just over a week with temperatures below freezing, under a high-emissions scenario.
Temperature differentials also impact the quality of skiing. When it’s warm during the day and cold at night, conditions get icy. Rain on top of snow erodes its strength and cohesiveness. And when snowpack layers don’t bond, conditions can become not just subpar but prone to avalanche. Convex crystals called “depth hoar,” which cup themselves into shallow snowpack, are similarly subject to slides.
Lower-elevation mountains may see the end of skiing altogether. According to California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, there probably won’t be any state snowpack below 6,000 feet by the end of the century. The same might be true of mountains in Utah.
Even though the ski industry is already seeing the beginnings of these changes, it can be hard, said glaciologist Twila Moon, to register those shifts in real-time. We get used to things. It’s kind of humans’ whole deal.
“People as individuals are fairly adaptable, and we are not very good at having a clear sense of what our climate and place we live are like even in our own experience,” said Moon, who works for the National Snow and Ice Data Center from her home in Montana. “We’re pretty forgetful in that way. … Once you hear ‘record-breaking temperatures’ enough years in a row, people stop paying attention to it. And that’s a real challenge.”
Schendler, though, feels up to the challenge of engaging and mobilizing those people to pay attention and to act. And he has to if Aspen Snowmass is to accomplish the sustainability goal it lists first: “To stay in business forever.”
The climate-induced changes haven’t been lost on him — in part because they’re not so gradual up here. He sees them in the smoke of bigger, more frequent fires. Last year, the Lake Christine conflagration burned 12,600 acres, and its scar helped release flash floods in the town of Basalt this summer. He sees them in the sometimes-truncated time between resort open and close, which can cost his employer millions of dollars.
It’s because of this, and the catastrophic quantifications climate science is now capable of, that he thinks big. “It’s really easy to do a lot of stuff on the ground and declare victory,” he said. “But none of the things people are doing on the operational level affects the climate in a meaningful way.”
Aspen has a name brand that can wield power over powerful people. “We can do things, and it will get attention,” Schendler said. “The point is not to not do small things. The point is to not think that’s your plan. Not to stop there.”
The newest of Aspen’s public-oriented campaigns is dubbed “Give a Flake.” It starts with 21st-century predictability, asking people to post images to social media with the hashtag #GiveAFlake. That’s easy, especially given how much outdoor types love to publicly display themselves doing outdoor things. The second component, though, gives people a way to call out their political representatives — either thanking them for supporting climate initiatives or pointing them (cheekily) to data that might make them, you know, give a flake.
This — mobilizing individuals beyond the purchase of a Chevy Volt or some solar panels — is part of Schendler’s whole philosophy. He’s not alone: Across the West, at resorts big and small, ritzy and run-down, family-style and single-centric, leaders are trying to keep the snow falling, keep themselves in business, educate visitors on how winter sports will inevitably change, and leverage the industry’s considerable economic and social clout to minimize the planet’s warming — for slopes, yes, but also for the rest of the planet.
Yeah, Aspen’s Aspen. It can talk a big game and push people around. But less swanky places need to rely on different techniques. “You have to fall back on what your strengths are, and make them stronger,” said Maura Olivos, sustainability coordinator at Alta Ski Area, just outside Salt Lake City. Olivos is an ecologist who used to do plant surveys or restoration projects in the summer and ski bum at Alta in the winter. Later, she started ecology work for the resort, and then came on full-time at the mountain’s sustainability center soon after it opened. “It was rough 10 years ago,” she said: People didn’t see the big deal. But today, with awareness and science in hand, her colleagues are more on board with the mission. “That just warms me up,” she said, perhaps unintentionally punning.
Olivos is most excited about Alta’s land conservation efforts and its ecological surveys. She said it’s important for the company to understand its mountain environment year-round so it can quantify and mitigate its shifts on the future. “The more we do now, the better for the future,” she said. “We can help make these lands resilient to whatever’s coming.”
On top of that, as snow melts more and falls less, off-season activities — hikes, zip-lines, mountain bikes, mountaintop beers just because — will become a bigger part of ski resorts’ operations. That’s good for business and good for inclusivity. “All of a sudden, these mountains are accessible — affordable and accessible,” Olivos said.
Part of her job is to help educate these warm-month visitors who tend not to know as much about how climate change affects their mountain, given they haven’t seen winter conditions deteriorate. As for the skiers, Olivos hopes greater understanding of climate realities will make them more resilient to variable conditions. Industry marketing has long convinced folks that skiing “out West” equates to “sweet pow.” To folks like Olivos, it’s time for that to change.
“Some people may not need powder skiing,” Olivos said. “If they’re from the Northeast, just no ice is awesome for them.” And in the future, that may also have to be awesome to those living at the base of Alta.
On the spectrum of potential climate-change impacts, shorter and less ideal ski seasons rank pretty low. Flooded cities, dead crops, lack of water, increased disease, deadly extreme weather, and crumbling infrastructure certainly command more attention. “A lot of people might say worrying about the ski industry isn’t a big deal,” Schendler said. “They’re right. Skiing is irrelevant.”
Much more dire is the fact that the West’s drinking-and-living water largely comes from snowpack. Scarce H2O means that everyone won’t have the water they want, or need, when they want or need it. Wildfires will get worse. Deadly heat waves will roll in. But even with all that existential threat, Schendler still sees skiing as important to the climate-change conversation.
“It’s a metaphor,” he said. “The loss of joy that’s tied to the loss of skiing is something people can understand.”
Skiing is a leisure activity, and especially in places like Aspen, a luxury. Civilization, Schendler argues, needs some version of that, whether it comes from winter sports or playing saxophone or scrawling poetry. “The threat from climate change is that we end up becoming a survival society,” he said. “Instead of investing in arts and culture and education, we’re spending money rebuilding highways and pumping out basements and highways and building levees and dams.”
If humans don’t take meaningful action to combat climate change — and perhaps even if they do — that’s not an unlikely future. Given the planetary scale of the problem, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and to shut out implications both present and future.
But Schendler doesn’t feel that way: He conceives of climate change efforts differently. “I don’t think of it as a battle to win or lose,” he said. “I see it as a practice, like yoga or martial arts or religion. You wake up; you do this thing.”
You hope it will keep your mountain, and your civilization, in business — forever.
