As avid snowboarders and winter sports enthusiasts, we first began noticing the effects of global climate change in terms of how it affected our sport.  Sure, the Valentine’s Day Blizzard of 2007 in northern Vermont was some of the best snow we’d seen in four years, but that season’s mid-December saw us wearing t-shirts and snowboarding on barely covered rocks and grass.  This season (2007-2008) we reveled in the record snowfalls.  during February but, contrastingly, were shocked in January when we took a trip to Smuggler’s Notch and saw empty weekend parking lots, bare grass, and water trickling down the slopes.  It is clear to us that climate change is affecting our sport, but how is it going to affect the ski industry in the state we’ve come to love?

A QUESTION OF EXTREMES

Many people find it hard to believe in global climate change, and cite the cyclical nature of weather to back their disbeliefs.  In the northeastern United States especially, already erratic weather patterns make it hard to cite specific instances of climate change.  For instance, skiers in the Northeast, specifically Vermont, rejoiced in 2007 when the aforementioned Valentine’s Day Blizzard dumped approximately three and a half feet of snow in the lower regions, and much more in the higher elevations of the Green Mountains. 

Todd Wright, the director of the Wilderness Program at St. Michael’s College for 12 years, and an avid skier and ice climber for 19 years, says he has trouble seeing how climate change has effected skiing.  “New England’s such a variable place, I

Next >>