Colorado’s snowmaking power – developed to attract holiday skiers and blanket terrain parks – may also protect the state’s slopes from climate change for a few extra decades, according to a United Nations report.
“We’re not looking at the obliteration of the ski industry this century, which is what some others have said in the past,” said Daniel Scott, a geographer at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a co-author of the report.
Past studies didn’t consider snowmaking, which lets ski resorts cover bald spots, open early and close late, Scott said. New fan-type snowblowers also can produce snow at relatively high temperatures, close to freezing, he said.
In a warmer world, snowmakers could keep trails covered longer – and at lower elevations more vulnerable to melting.
Even snowmaking, however, won’t be able to keep Colorado’s winter slopes consistently white by 2100 if climate change follows a “severe” trajectory, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a report released Monday.
Federal weather experts also reported Monday that last month was the second-warmest March on record in the U.S. – beaten only by March 1910.
Mark Williams, a snow-and-ice researcher with the University of Colorado, used computer climate models last year to peer into the future of the Aspen Mountain ski area.
Working for the city of Aspen, not the U.N., Williams asked what would happen if people reined in greenhouse-gas emissions and what would happen if they didn’t – which roughly corresponds to the U.N.’s “severe” scenario.
In either case, Aspen should be in good shape through 2030, with the help of snowblowers, Williams said. But by 2100, the slopes could be pretty muddy.
If people reduce greenhouse emissions quickly, the ski area might lose only about half the skiable terrain at the bottom of the mountain in 2100 – and that could be made by up snowmaking, Williams said.
If the world continues to emit more and more greenhouse gases, Williams said, “Aspen’s in real trouble. There’s going to be almost no snow, even at the top of the mountain.”
The new U.N. report predicts that by mid-century, Northeastern ski areas will start to see new weather extremes: warmer winters and more bad ski years in a row.
Colorado’s ski areas – in colder, higher altitudes – are in better shape than others in the country, Williams and Scott agreed.
“Eventually, a lot of the other ski areas in the United States are going to go out of business, and the ski areas here are asking, ‘How are people going to learn to ski?”‘ Williams said.
Colorado’s ski areas rely, in part, on customers who learn to ski on icy hills back East and travel West for real powder, said Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association in Lakewood.
In Colorado, and the rest of the country, ski areas are covering more and more terrain with blowers, Berry said. Resorts want to attract customers during December’s holidays, when even now, nature doesn’t always provide enough snow, he said.
Staff writer Jeremy P. Meyer contributed to this story.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
