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Longtime local Katie Ertl remembers the large snowdrifts of her childhood, and the way the snow used to cover the roads near her home in Aspen Village.
“My twin sister Megan and I would ski down to the bus stop on the roads, and then after school and ski training, we would drag one another back up the hill on our skis,” she said. “And I have noticed that there's more pavement now than there used to be when we were kids.”
That’s just one of the ways Ertl has seen climate change manifesting in the Roaring Fork Valley.
As the senior vice president of mountain operations at Aspen Skiing Company, she knows the impacts go well beyond her childhood commute to school.
“A scientific fact is we have approximately 30 days less of frost,” she said. “So technically, winter has shrunk by a month.”
Data from local weather stations demonstrates the shrinking season over the last few decades.
An analysisfrom the Aspen Global Change Institute calculated an average of 89 consecutive frost-free days per year in the 1980s, or three straight months where the temperature didn’t dip below freezing.
A few decades later, for the period from 2010 to 2018, the average was 120 days, or four months.
“That's almost a month's worth of days either in the fall or the spring, where you're going to see anything that falls out of the sky as rain instead of snow, or if you already have snow on the ground, that snow starting to melt early,” said Elise Osenga, community science manager at the Global Change Institute.
Climatologist Peter Goble, from the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, has noticed the changes too.
“We're seeing more years where snowmelt starts and is outpacing new accumulations from new storms earlier in the year,” he said.
He says we’re in a better position here in Colorado—our snow builds up at higher elevations and at colder temperatures than some mountains on the West Coast, for instance.
Still, long-term climate models that project more warming in the future don’t paint a pretty picture.
“There's a lot still that remains to be seen going forward, but overall warming temperatures is not good news for skiing,” Goble said.
But if you looked up at the snow-covered mountains this past winter, or even some of the snowfall data at local ski areas, that might be hard to believe.
On a cold, overcast day in late March, Aspen Highlands Snow Safety Director Jeffrey “O.J.” Melahn headed into a grove of trees below the Cloud 9 chairlift to take snow measurements.
“We try to keep this area undisturbed,” he said, pointing to a “Please Keep Out” sign posted at the entrance.
Melahn and his fellow ski patrollers have been recording daily snowfall at this same weather study site for three decades, and their data shows the average amount of snow falling on the mountain has stayed mostly the same so far.
“We have wet years with lots of snowfall and we have dry years without much snowfall, and I don't think there's any real pattern,” Melahn said in an interview.
That variability is something SkiCo’s Senior Vice President of Sustainability Auden Schendler sees too.
But with temperatures warming and the number of freezing days shrinking, he said you need more flakes to fall to maintain the same amount of coverage on the slopes.
“In a hotter world, you need more snow if you want standard soil moisture and snowpack,” he said. “So what O.J. is reporting is right: Snowfall is about the same, but in a warmer world that doesn’t work.”
In order to address climate change, Schendler said SkiCo has a responsibility not only to reduce its own carbon emissions, but to help push climate action and policy that will have an impact beyond the ski industry.
“Aspen has power,” he said. “If we can wield that power in ways that move whole systems, utilities, state policy, federal policy, if we can influence really powerful guests who visit here, if we can get in the media and change social norms about how we talk about climate change, that's how we're going to go after this problem.”
Ertl is grateful that SkiCo has a sustainability team that’s looking at ways to protect people’s livelihoods and tackle carbon emissions.
But with changes already happening, she said ski areas also need to take steps to keep snow on the slopes now.
“I think what we're looking at is reaction right now and then forward thinking as to how we can be prepared as things start to change,” she said.
One example of that reaction is “glading,” or strategically removing some trees and dead brush to create a more skiable run, something Ertl said SkiCo plans to do more of on its mountains.
According to Ertl, the snow doesn’t melt as easily when a run gets packed down by skiers. She said you can already see that effect in existing gladed areas, like Reidar’s Glades near the High Alpine chairlift at Snowmass Ski Area.
“We're inviting skiers and riders to come into that space and that compaction helps the snow compress if you will, and stay firmer longer,” she said.
Ertl said they’re also changing how they do snowmaking.
In 2021, SkiCo was only able to blow about 10% of the snow it normally makes by opening day because of warmer weather.
With fewer freezing days in the fall, SkiCo is starting to install and use snowmaking machines at higher elevations where it's colder.
“We are seeing that at the elevation of 10,000 feet and above, both at Snowmass and Aspen Mountain, we're able to make that snow earlier in the season than we are down low,” Ertl said.
Down at Sunlight Mountain Resort near Glenwood Springs, Mountain Manager Mike Baumli and his team are dealing with some of the same challenges.
“It's been kind of hit or miss in the fall, but I think we are seeing shorter, warmer winters,” he said.
His team is exploring different ways to catch the snow that does fall and get more efficient at filling in the gaps, too.
“We've really expanded our snow fencing program so that we're catching more of the natural snow that’s blowing around.”
Once enough snow has built up along the fences, snowcats can then spread out the bounty on the slopes.
Sunlight’s Assistant General Manager Ross Terry said they’ve also upgraded their snowmaking equipment to newer technology that’s less energy intensive and can make snow even when temperatures are in the upper 20s.
“That goes a long way to making your snowmaking easier, making it more efficient, and getting more coverage out of the same amount of water,” he said.
But even with more efficient equipment and on-mountain reservoirs for storing water, managers at Sunlight and SkiCo worry that strained water supplies across the West will impact their ability to make snow.
“We have to pay attention to what the town's needs are and make sure that snowmaking can happen, but maybe it doesn't happen to the level that we're used to,” Ertl said.
When it comes to issues like drought and climate change, Ertl and Schendler agree the only way to ensure skiing can continue in the future is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through policy and direct action.
“My take is, look, you have got to be working on solving this problem because we can do all the snowmaking we want and we're still gonna go out of business,” Schendler said.
They also both recognize that there’s a lot more at stake than just the death of a sport.
“Skiing is superfluous. It's a luxury,” Schendler said. “And so if it goes away, boohoo, whatever, but you have to think of climate change in terms of what it threatens to do to society.”
Schendler believes skiing and other winter activities are just one small way to help people understand what they could lose in a “climate changed world.”
“People can understand an obscure and complicated and technical problem like climate in terms of something they love and care about,” he said.
Schendler frames it as a “historical and familial issue.”
“You always went sledding with your family, and if you stand to lose that, well, what have we lost as humans and as a culture?”
As for the managers at Sunlight Mountain, they hope the small, local ski area can stick it out so that future generations can have the same experience growing up on the snow-covered slopes.
“It's been a great place for my kids to grow up skiing,” Baumli said. “It’s a super fun, family-oriented place and I really just hope that it's here for the same experience for my kids' kids and my kids' kids' kids.”
Editor’s note: This story is part of Aspen Public Radio’s four-part series, “Adaptation: Responding to Climate Change in the Roaring Fork Valley.”
The series is supported by a grant from the Aspen Skiing Company’s Environment Foundation. If you have a story idea for our ongoing climate coverage, please reach out to news@aspenpublicradio.org.
