As guests ski and ride down Schoomarm, a stretch of beginner-friendly terrain at Keystone Resort in Colorado, they are treated to views of Dillon Reservoir nearly the whole way down. More eagle-eyed skiers and riders will notice that snowmaking machines line the run’s three miles, which spans from summit to base.
On a sunny, cloudless November day, it’s one of the resort's only accessible ski runs with much of the credit going to those machines.
“It gives pretty much everybody the ability to ski here on day one,” said Kate Schifani, the resort’s senior director of mountain operations. She says Keystone is super focused on that early opening day.
“We are the first resort in the country to open,” she said, referring to the 2025 season. “So we put a lot of stock in what we can do early-season, and having great snowmaking helps us do that.”
It’s a familiar problem for Rocky Mountain ski resorts over the last 20 years, which have become increasingly prone to scant early season snow. Many have chosen to stick with their traditional opening days near the Thanksgiving holiday and take the gamble that snow might arrive in time. To match their guests’ demands for skiable acreage amid a warming climate, resorts are doubling down on snowmaking technology and acquiring the water rights needed to make it happen.
Winter is off to a slow start across the West this year. Snowpack is below average in every major river basin across the entire region. That’s a concern for ski resorts, many of which have delayed their opening days. That includes Jackson Hole in Wyoming, Alta in Utah, and Beaver Creek, just down the highway from Keystone.
Human-caused climate change has changed the way precipitation falls in the mountains, especially in autumn. As more early season storm clouds bring rain instead of snow, resorts are increasingly relying on snowmaking to give their guests the ability to ski at all.
But this year, it wasn’t just a lack of snow that caused resorts headaches. November was warm as well, which also affects snowmaking operations. Throughout the Upper Colorado River Basin, temperatures were anywhere from five to eight degrees above average, with much of Utah setting records. Denver logged its warmest November day ever this year.
Schifani said ideally, snowmaking happens when it’s colder than 28 degrees.
“So it's 32.7 degrees right now,” she said, checking the temperature on a monitor attached to one of the snow guns at the top of the River Run gondola. “So we're just a little too warm for snowmaking.”
Keystone made upgrades to its snowmaking system in 2019, so all of its guns are relatively new. Each one has a weather system built into it, detecting temperature and relative humidity. They’re all automated, so when it finally drops below 28 degrees, the guns turn on with a loud rumble.
“This gun will know as it gets colder, we can add more water, we can make more snow,” Schifani explained. “As it gets warmer, we cut back on the water, we make a little bit less snow until it gets too warm for us to make snow at all.”
Once it’s cold enough, man-made snow takes about two parts compressed air and one part water. Unlike other uses in the West that transport water over long distances to sprawling cities or faraway farm fields, snowmaking keeps water close to where it originated.
Steven Fassnacht, a professor of snow hydrology at Colorado State University, said that about 80% of the water used in snowmaking goes back into the watershed it came from.
“(Ski resorts) are taking water out of the river, out of a reservoir… and they’re putting it on the mountain and they’re storing it somewhere different for the winter,” he said. “So the actual use, we call it consumptive use, the amount of water that leaves the system is relatively small.”
But that use still matters in a region where every drop of water is accounted for. Fassnacht said it will matter even more as the region’s climate gets warmer and drier, and as competition for water ramps up.
“In drier conditions, maybe that water use—possibly, likely—that consumptive use is actually going to increase,” he said. “And it may be harder to actually get that water out of the system to put on the mountains.”
Ski areas’ water usage can get contentious. Telluride Resort is currently in a dispute with the town of Mountain Village over its water use, and a federal court recently dismissed a lawsuit from Purgatory, a resort near Durango, over accessing decades-old groundwater rights on Forest Service land.
Chris Cushing is a principal with the consulting firm SE Group, which works on mountain planning for resorts across the country.
He recently worked with Deer Valley in Utah on a massive expansion: the resort added ten new chairlifts and doubled its skiable terrain, which it plans to open this season — with a state of the art snowmaking system.
“It’s just massive, it’s literally building a new ski resort,” he said of the expansion, which is called East Village.
Cushing says the expansion was only possible because the land acquired by Deer Valley already had water rights allocated to it — a calculation many other resorts he works with are having to factor in their plans as well.
“Absolutely the first question I ask is, ‘what's your water situation?’” he said.
Long-term drought means ski resorts aren’t just in the game of acquiring new supplies, but also how to make the water they do have go further.
In 2023, Keystone added a new chairlift, providing skiers and riders easier access to its Bergman Bowl, which used to be an area only hikers could reach. Schifani says the resort expanded its snowmaking system to blanket that area at will too.
“But for perspective, that didn't take any more water than we had previously used because we just got better at using what we already have,” she said.
It’s not yet clear what this winter will bring for the ski industry, but resorts, like other water users across the West, will have to prepare for the reality of doing more with less.
This story was produced in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder Center for Environmental Journalism.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
