By Tyler Stepanian

I glided through the snow, making crisp carves and turns that cut into the powder below me. The wind was whipping in my face, its high-pitched, aggressive whirring ringing through my ears as I pushed down the slope. Up in front of me, I saw a lump of snow that I deemed perfect for a quick launch into the air to pull off the tricks I had been practicing, so I pushed towards it and sprung into the air. However, mid-flight, I noticed something odd and alarming about the snow at the landing of the jump. It had a brownish-orange tint to it, with a few rocks poking out. But it was already too late. I plunged into dirt, making a jolting impact, resulting in me flipping and rolling through the mud and snow as I had now achieved the coveted yard sale. This unfortunate episode happened in the Blue Ridge Mountains at the Wintergreen Resort this past January. 

The author and Randolph Campbell (’24) at Wintergreen. Photo credit: Tyler Stepanian.

Wintergreen Resort is a ski resort located roughly two hours away from Richmond, about 45 minutes southwest of Charlottesville, and it sits atop the Blue Ridge Mountains at an elevation of around 3900 feet. This allows for visitors at certain times of the year to spend their mornings skiing at the top of the mountain and their afternoons playing a round of 18 at the resort’s golf course at the base of the mountain. My whole life, my family has owned a small condo on the mountain, and some of my fondest memories include all of my family and friends piling into the small three-bedroom condo and skiing the days away throughout the winter and early spring. The resort features decent skiing terrain for East Coast standards, and it’s a great vacation destination when the mountain is fully open. The key word here is “when.” 

In recent years, Wintergreen has had very inconsistent snowfall totals, making it hard to open all of their terrain for skiing. In fact, the snowfall has been so inconsistent that, according to the skiing conditions website onthesnow, the total snowfall at Wintergreen in the past six years has been zero three times, whereas, during the early 2010’s, the resort averaged upwards of 40 inches of snow per year. 

Although this data are alarming, there are a variety of reasons for this downward trend, the first being the elevation of the resort. The lower elevation is one of the highlights of the resort, but it is also one of its drawbacks, causing it to have low snowfall totals and 54-degree days in the middle of winter. This makes it not uncommon to see skiers dressed in only ski pants and a long sleeve t-shirt when they hit the slopes. 

A lack of snow on a European ski slope. Photo credit: pixabay user almavanta.

The second, and perhaps more obvious reason for this inconsistency in snowfall, is climate change. The phenomenon is affecting not just Wintergreen, but the world as a whole, creating inconsistent and strange weather patterns throughout the globe, as the earth progressively grows warmer and sea levels rise. Globally, the temperature has “risen by an average of 0.14° Fahrenheit (0.08° Celsius) per decade since 1880, or about 2° F in total,” and “the rate of warming since 1981 is more than twice as fast: 0.32° F (0.18° C) per decade.” In Virginia, the state’s climate is changing where, “most of the state has warmed about one degree (F) in the past century and the sea is rising about one to two inches per decade.” Another example comes in California, one of the nation’s driest states, where this winter, there has been record snowfall in northern California and record rainfall totals in southern California, resulting in unprecedented flooding. 

However, Wintergreen is not the only ski community that is being affected by this change in the climate. In the Northeast, unusually high temperatures and lack of snow caused some ski resorts in the region to close. Mad River Glen, a ski resort in Vermont, temporarily closed its resort throughout the season because of the warm temperatures. Another example of this comes from Burlington, a famous ski town northeast of Mad River Glen, that “saw temperatures as high as 25 degrees above normal before the new year, with temperatures still running 10-15 degrees above average to start the year” in the area. Also, at the “iconic ski resorts like Killington and Stowe (VT) have seen about 50 inches of snow, while their season averages are closer to 200.” This effect is being seen worldwide, and in the French Alps, an area famous for its excellent skiing, there has been little to almost no snowfall and a generally mild European winter this year, causing many resorts to close and fear for what their future may look like. 

However, Wintergreen is still able to open its slopes every year thanks to a groundbreaking invention that has saved their resort. According to their website, their “state-of-the-art Liberty computerized snowmaking system gives Wintergreen the SNOWPOWER to consistently offer the Mid-Atlantic’s best skiing and snowboarding surfaces.” Also, “Wintergreen is the only ski area on the East Coast to have 100 percent of its terrain covered by automated snowmaking. This complex system involves approximately 40,000 linear feet of pipeline, more than 400 snowguns, and 45 weather stations” that constantly blow snow day and night throughout the winter to provide the snow that Mother Nature so often does not.

A view down a ski slope in Wintergreen. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons user Mojo Hand.

Like Wintergreen, most ski resorts up and down the East Coast have implemented similar snow-making systems to combat the effects of climate change and keep their businesses running. However, in the not-so-distant future, it’s possible resorts all around the world will start to implement these snow-making systems into their mountains to combat the lack of natural snowfall due to climate change. 

Since the 1980s, there has been a 40 percent decrease in average snowfall levels globally, making the ski season around a month shorter than it was forty years ago. This decrease is making many fearful for the future of the roughly 90 billion dollar global industry that is winter sports, which creates millions of jobs and supports thousands of communities worldwide. If this trend of snowfall levels continues in the same direction due to climate change, in a couple of decades, Wintergreen Resort may just be a vacant hill that once held a thriving community.