The second day of our ski trip in January was a Sunday, the day after the helicopter dropped us at a hut in south-central B.C. and chopped away again, not to return for a week.
The second day is the day I’ll remember, because conditions on the mountain meant it was the last day we were able to ski all week. We spent the rest of the trip cooped up in a cabin. Even old timers in the ski business in Western Canada can’t recall anything similar. Marco Delesalle, our guide, who has skied more or less non-stop for 30 years, remembers being socked in by weather for two days. But five? Because the temperature 2½ kilometres in the sky was jammed at three degrees above zero, in January? Unheard of.
Until now. Owing to climate change, winter – at least the predictable Canadian winter many of us remember, the long, white, nation-defining, finger-freezing, school-closing, sound-muting, time-stopping, soul-stilling months-long whitefest of yore – is fast becoming a memory. That we did this to ourselves is by now not a newsflash. But just how much we’re about to lose, not just in what we can do but in who we can be, is turning out to be an alarming revelation.
Warmer winters are not just a seasonal problem: A smaller snowpack affects the water supply we depend on year-round. Science reporter Ivan Semeniuk spoke with The Decibel about the latest research of snowpack and its connection to climate change. Subscribe for more episodes.
“We’re 15, and we’re skiing Sweet Stuff,” said Kathy Meyer, our other guide. She’s 42 and can ski anything, always gracefully. She announced how many we were and our whereabouts at the top of every slope we skied. That way, if there was a big avalanche, the unburied could radio back to the lodge – we all carried radios – with our location.
Skiing in remote mountain country requires stark and unsentimental clarity: You declare the risk, take the necessary precautions, proceed one step at a time, entrust each other with your lives. Then when you get back to the city nothing seems as daunting as it did before you left. All this happened at Selkirk Lodge, a cabin just above tree line near the Albert Glacier, a 15-minute whirl from Revelstoke, B.C. Some claim it’s the finest back-country ski terrain on earth.
We spent the first morning remembering how to work an avalanche beacon. After lunch, we took a couple of warm-up runs. In general, 2024 has been a low-snow winter in Western Canada – by March 1, the province was still 40 per cent below its median – but the terrain around the lodge shouldered a foot of fresh untracked powder.
The second day, the memorable day, we were out the door at 8:30 a.m. We skied down from the hut on a treeless plunge called Lodge Run. The day was overcast and visibility was hairily nil. But it improved as we descended. At the bottom of the second pitch – by now we were at tree line – we reattached our climbing skins to our skis. Skins are wide strips of artificial mohair that let you walk up steep slopes without sliding backward. We ascended a small rise. There we shed our skins again and skied the next, even steeper pitch through the trees.
The trees got bigger and closer together as we dropped. You have to remember to ignore them and aim for the spaces. I was skiing with my old pal John Mitchell, because you always ski trees with a partner, in case one of you falls down a tree well. (He has.) What I love most about skiing trees is the windless silence, the way the snow-muffled stillness wraps around you. A third, even tighter pitch took us to the floor of our white and green valley.
Skins on. We climbed back up the mountain. The time ratio of climbing to descending is about six to one, which probably seems like a poor return on effort, but you get into the rhythm of climbing, the sheer enlivening pleasure of putting one foot in front of the other, of proprioception. You earn your turns, as the phrase goes.
At the top, we fell into a new, untracked north-facing run that dropped 200 metres to the next bench; then swooped into another, down steep gullies and snow-covered waterfalls through glades of trees. I lost count of how many pitches we skied: eight? Ten?
Ian Brown's ski group assembles. 'What I love most about skiing trees is the windless silence, the way the snow-muffled stillness wraps around you,' he says.Ian Brown/The Globe and Mail
It’s hard to describe the complete physical pleasure that skiing even a single run of powder can produce. Many skiers and writers have likened it to the exhilaration of excellent sex, and a well-skied slope of fresh deep fluff bears that comparison. But it’s also more technical, at both the specific and the general level, at once more focused and freer. It’s like solving an engineering challenge – why won’t the door latch when it’s closed? Ah, the bolt is locked! – and then having sex as your reward.
You have to concentrate on one thing and one thing only, a selfish thrill. You have to let go – this is always my biggest problem – and let the slope and the snow guide you. You have to lean your entire body forward, shins against boots, but not too far forward, and never from the waist, which means you have to embrace recurring plunges of terrifying full-body downhill acceleration. It feels reckless, but it feels too good not to do it again.
You have to go faster than you think you should go. In other words, you have to trust your physical self, which is harder as you get older – I’ve been trying to get powder skiing right for 40 years – because you have to convince yourself that disaster will not inevitably ensue. A certain physical fatalism is involved. It’s glorious when you do it right, as if you have been liberated, not just physically but psychologically, too, from all that ties us down and thwarts us, from all the prisons of the past, because this is the unavoidable present. If you can do all that, you get to feel as physically alive as you ever will, a rare sensation that gets rarer still as you age. So perhaps you understand why I might not want to stop skiing in the back-country even though I probably should, because at this point the returns are diminishing.
These are all matters you think about as you then climb back up the slope, when you aren’t chatting with your comrades about work or kids or partners or distant hopes or lurking disappointments or the many other conversational intimacies back-country skiing draws out.
Finally, after four hours of playing in the fields of the Lord, as the writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen once described this kind of pleasure, it was time to climb back to the hut. Three of us called it a day; the others went up a nearby ridge for one more run. Everyone says it’s okay, you stop when you have to stop, there is no shame in it. But it feels shameful anyway: a quiet acknowledgment that you are not as young or as daring, that this gorgeous experience we call a life is not yours to keep, you have to give it back. The run you don’t make is a reminder that the return date is getting closer, and you can no longer be oblivious to its nearing the way young people can, which is probably part of why we find them beautiful.
Everyone was back in the hut by midafternoon of Day 2. We had no idea we had come to the end of our ski trip.
The problem was twofold. El Niño, the much-studied Pacific Ocean phenomenon, had parked an atmospheric river of humid air over most of British Columbia. At 2,460 metres of elevation at the 51st latitude in January, also known as the dead middle of winter, that ought not to have been a problem. But avalanches were coming down all around us, long sagging slabs and sloughs of heavy snow. Meanwhile, the warming snow was both crusted on top and isothermic (basically bottomless) below, an ankle- and knee-destroying combination.
Normal winter weather is now like this: volatile and extreme. Why? The Arctic, as almost everyone at last acknowledges, has been warming much faster than the rest of the globe, thanks largely to man-made climate change. (Some estimates say three times as fast.) The dark ocean absorbs the sunlight that the now-disappearing ice once reflected, and returns it to the atmosphere as warmer, wetter heat. That moist energy then interacts with the polar vortex.
This has always happened, just not as often or as unpredictably as it does now. A polar vortex whirls in a counterclockwise circle of cold low pressure over both poles. Think of it as a spinning figure skater: As long as she keeps her arms in, she spins tight and fast and stays contained and compact. If something knocks her off balance – like a big unavoidable bulge of hot moist stormy air rolling into her – her arms come down, and she slows down, while her form distorts (with warm air leaking northward and cold polar air oozing south). She gets sloppy.
In other words, accelerated warming in the Arctic is reducing the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. According to that theory, Professor Joe Shea, a geoscientist at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), explained to me in an e-mail, “the reduced temperature gradient between the poles and the equator could produce a ‘wavier’ jet stream, which allows abnormal weather patterns (hot/cold, wet/dry) to set up for longer periods of time.”
Recent research suggests there are more of these “weak” and leaky polar vortices, and that they create extreme fluctuations in winter weather. Some of those wobbles look like warming, while some of them look like the opposite.
In this way, a globally warming planet produces, on the one hand, enough moisture to foment record storms (such as the endless blizzard that buried Nova Scotia last month, and then soaked it in torrential rains), and, on the other, mild and snowless Decembers and Januaries that this winter have significantly worsened the drought in southern Alberta and southern B.C.
Snow long
Human-caused climate change has led to a significant loss of spring snowpack at mid-latitudes across the Northern Hemisphere. Here the difference over a 40-year period is shown for individual watersheds linked to major rivers.
Per cent change per decade (1981–2020)
Decrease
Increase
-10
-9
-8
-7
-6
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
2
3
4
5%
NORTH AMERICA
EUROPE AND ASIA
the globe and mail, Source:
dartmouth college
Snow long
Human-caused climate change has led to a significant loss of spring snowpack at mid-latitudes across the Northern Hemisphere. Here the difference over a 40-year period is shown for individual watersheds linked to major rivers.
Per cent change per decade (1981–2020)
Decrease
Increase
-10%
-9
-8
-7
-6
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
2
3
4
5%
NORTH AMERICA
EUROPE AND ASIA
the globe and mail, Source: dartmouth college
Snow long
Human-caused climate change has led to a significant loss of spring snowpack at mid-latitudes across the
Northern Hemisphere. Here the difference over a 40-year period is shown for individual watersheds linked
to major rivers.
Decrease
Increase
-10%
-9
-8
-7
-6
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
2
3
4
5%
Per cent change per decade (1981–2020)
the globe and mail, Source: dartmouth college
A brand-new discovery, as of this year, is that climate change is also undermining the snowpack. Justin Mankin and Alexander Gottlieb, two climate scientists at Dartmouth College, studied snowfall between 1981 and 2020 in 169 river basins across the northern hemisphere. Their results, published in January in Nature, are as bewildering as they are alarming. In places like Siberia and parts of northern Canada, snow is more abundant than ever. Last month, for instance, 10 feet of snow fell on Inuvik in two days.
But in some of the most populated regions of the northern hemisphere, springtime snow water equivalents (SWEs, a common measure of the snowpack) have been declining for 40 years. Two of the worst-hit places are the northeastern United States (which has lost 10 per cent of its snowpack per decade) and the American southwest, which derives 75 per cent of its water from melting snow. (Watersheds around Selkirk Lodge seem to have averaged 3-per-cent to 5-per-cent losses in snowpack per decade.)
That means the southwest and the northeast could be “close to snow free” within the lifetimes of today’s toddlers. Both regions are already facing a “snow-loss cliff,” because as soon as the average winter temperature in a given catchment rises above -8 C, the snowpack slips into jeopardy. And the loss is exponential: A one-degree gain above the threshold melts 5 per cent to 10 per cent of your snowpack; a second degree washes away 20 per cent or more. That’s the beginning of the end of winter as most North Americans know it.
The consequences are already dramatic. The water shortages are the worst of it. But also, the U.S. ski industry alone is worth US$20-billion a year. Entire communities now rely on a waning snowpack for their livelihood and their cultural identity. (Most snow-making machines need temperatures of -5 C to operate.)
Elizabeth Burakowski, a climate scientist at the University of New Hampshire, recently determined that between 1980 and 2005, New England averaged 95 snow-covered days a year. If carbon emissions remain high, that will quickly drop to 56 days. Every enterprise associated with the culture of winter will be a victim. Some say even maple syrup tastes less sweet when winter’s warmer.
Whistler's ski slopes had patchy areas like this one in late December, but then a heavy snowfall in late February and early March.Ethan Cairns/The Canadian Press
Anyone who has skied in Western Canada over the past four decades knows firsthand that snow conditions are more variable than they used to be. There are still stretches of bountiful snowy winter – Whistler embraced a dump of 189 centimetres a fortnight ago – and periods of shattering cold. But they’re less predictable than they were. Meanwhile, a week in a lodge in B.C., with guides and food and a chef to cook it, can cost upward of $4,500, and has to be reserved two years in advance.
We could see vast expanses of snow from our hut; we just couldn’t ski them. It’s hard to convey to non-skiers how alluring those views can be, how neatly and completely the flawless white snow upholsters the terrain, how daunting and beseeching they are at the same time. Looking up across a snow-draped mountain, you understand how humbly you have to cross them, what a daring privilege it is to be allowed to go there. But now our pass had been revoked, by forces completely beyond our control.
UNBC’s Joe Shea told me temperatures were 10 degrees higher than normal across B.C. in January. “Which is pretty unusual,” Prof. Shea acknowledged. (Globally, 2023 was the warmest year on the historical record.) El Niño didn’t help, but climate change is the more pernicious culprit. “Any weather event that happens now is affected by global warming,” Prof. Shea explained. “I would say your experience falls into the category of weather superimposed on climate change” – a recipe, he added, for “weather anarchy.”
Winter is now as moody as a 15-year-old teenager. Ice coverage on the Great Lakes in mid-February was at an all-time low. The final weekend of the U.S. pond hockey championship was cancelled in Minneapolis, and Quebec City was so warm in February, Bonhomme closed his Ice Palace for “safety reasons.” At the annual Western Snow Conference, to be held for the 91st time this April in Corvallis, Ore., the title of the keynote speech is “Should I Teach my Grandkids to Ski? An Examination of Climate Change and Snow in the Western U.S.”
Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
With skiing a bust, we hung around the hut. There were 14 of us, plus two guides and three hut staffers. It’s not that big a hut. Mr. Delesalle and Ms. Meyer broke a three-kilometre track on the non-avalanche-prone moraine around the cabin – Kathy’s Quest, we called it – which we trudged around on skis and climbing skins, adding a kilometre-and-a-half of loops of our own (Bishop’s Landing, Andrew’s Folly).
I could manage two circuits an hour, but the young guys lapped me. That was sobering. Most of us racked up 10 to 15 kilometres a day on the skin track, just to turn the motor on, but it wasn’t skiing, and especially not the glorious skiing we could cruelly see all around us but not attempt.
We filled the time. We played a mutant version of gin rummy in which the rules seemed to change every hand. There was a chess board. A great deal of reading was accomplished. (Paul Auster’s excellent Baumgartner, Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest, not as good as the movie.)
Kelly Mager, our cook (Mr. Delesalle’s partner, a brilliant chef), took to looking out the kitchen window and calling the weather “the new substandard,” which was scientifically accurate, when she wasn’t sharing mountain gossip (which guides had split up and why, which lodges were possibly for sale as a result, who was drinking too much).
Ms. Meyer gave us a guided tour of what she carried in her bottomless pack (to deal with all possible catastrophes, from snapped poles to broken necks); taught us knots; showed us how to rig a pulley system to haul someone out of a crevasse. A few people delivered seminars: about Burning Man, about the prospect of making steel with hydrogen.
We were decent, and civilized. There were no arguments, no tense moments. But we never experienced the sensation of total physical … happiness, I suppose … with which a day of tramping the mountains in search of skiable slopes leaves you. Instead the winter melted all around us, and we melted too, safe but claustrophobic.
The nadir of hutbound conversation was reached on Thursday, when one of the Argentines maintained that it was acceptable to pee in a communal shower (say, at a sports club). The subject was debated for at least an hour, with all but one of us (the same Argentine) coming down against the practice. Vast clouds of laughter were common all week long.
What I am trying to say is that we adapted. Adaptation has its satisfactions: It’s the proud B-side to winter’s harsh vigour. For millenniums, winter was a season hostile to most human life, to be avoided at all cost – until it was romanticized in the 19th century, after central heating and the radiator were invented, after it became easy to get warm again. But when even romanticized winter is no longer what it was – tenaciously cold, steadily snowy, reliably lethal – it becomes a slushier, less elemental version of itself, and so do we.
Slushy days on the slopes, like this one at Whistler last December, are a reality many Canadian skiers have had to adapt to.Ethan Cairns/The Canadian Press
Being denied the enormous privilege of back-country skiing in the mountains is an irrelevance next to the climate-induced tragedies that less fortunate people are already suffering. But winter – cold, dark, unforgiving winter – created half our collective human physical consciousness of the world. The day will come (not soon, I hope) when I can’t physically manage skiing any more, and that will be the sharp but thrilling price of having lived, of getting older. But to lose the season altogether feels cataclysmic.
I later asked Prof. Burakowski, the climate scientist at the University of Vermont, why it felt so sad. “There is a word for it,” she said. “Solastalgia.”
Solastalgia is the distress one feels as a result of unforeseen and uncontrollable environmental changes in one’s home territory. There’s a mountain in your backyard, and then it is mined away to nothing. You’re used to the engulfing silence of winter snowstorms, and suddenly there are no more storms.
“For me,” Prof. Burakowski told me – she’s a long-time snowboarder, which should not be held against her – ”when I look out on a 70-degree day in February, which we’ve had in the last couple of years, things don’t look snowy at all. It just looks kind of bland. I’m grieving the loss of winter-like conditions that I grew up with, that remind me of what home used to be like.”
For people who miss the snowy days of their youth, like this excursion at Toronto's Black Creek Pioneer Village in the 1970s, 'solastalgia' is a useful word to describe the sense of loss.Barrie Davis/The Globe and Mail
To stave off boredom one grey afternoon, after everyone had skinned their laps, we built an igloo down the slope from the cabin. It was a proper, well-planned igloo with a proper sunken entrance, all built from proper quarried snow blocks. It took four hours and accommodated 14 people. That’s a big igloo. We made it together, and then piled in and sat on its built-in snow benches, chatting and drinking beer.
On our seventh and last night, the night before the helicopter came to take us back to snowless civilization, we sat and talked and joked in our igloo, with a boom-box and a battery-operated disco light someone found in the cabin. I have to say it was one of my favourites of all the nights I have spent outdoors in the mountains. No one was ever unhappy in the igloo. It was proof of our collective ability to stay engaged in any circumstance, and an artifact of our friendship imposed upon the landscape.
Maybe there is an ironic justice in that: After all, it was mankind’s love of the inside, of comfort and safety and warmth and convenience gained through the extraction of coal and oil and gas, that ultimately warped the climate and made winter less dependable, less formative and less Canadian.
In the igloo that last night we talked, of course, about next year, about the next trip, about new places we might go to ski. Someone suggested we set up a winter camp of our own, with platform tents and a stove, and ski up and out and down from there. I worry, as always, that I’ll be too old to manage it, but I hope it happens: I want at least one more real winter, to tell me if it’s time to stop.
The discussion did not include any mention of the disappointment our current trip had become, nor did we question whether there would be any snow to ski on. That’s not the way human beings approach the future.