Skiers and snowboarders exploring Copper Mountain’s Resolution Bowl on a recent weekend dodged semi-exposed rocks, the tips of small trees and yellow tufts of exposed grass, sneakily covered by a slick layer of ice.
It felt like an early-season ski day, but it was late January. And this was smack in the middle of one of the biggest snowstorms of the unusually dry, warm winter.
Colorado’s ski season began with a slate of delayed openings, as resorts including Beaver Creek, Powderhorn and Purgatory pushed back the start of the season because of a lack of snow. In early February — two months from peak snowpack — at least a third of the runs at Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Eldora and Loveland remained closed. Winter Park Resort had opened less than a third of its terrain.
“The stuff that is open in the trees at Mary Jane is more likely to mess up your skis than be enjoyable,” Hunter Diveley, a 27-year-old who lives in Englewood, said of the section of Winter Park known for its advanced terrain.
The situation was worse at Arapahoe Basin, home to some of the highest-elevation terrain of any ski area in North America — where still only 21% of the area’s 147 runs were open as of Thursday.
While it’s difficult to tie one season’s weather patterns directly to climate change, this winter’s extended balmy temperatures and less reliable snow will become more common as Colorado continues to warm. Seasons will grow shorter, climate scientists say, and snow quality will deteriorate. While the amount of precipitation may remain the same, the moisture will more often fall as rain instead of snow in the fall and spring — especially at lower elevations.
“For our industry, this is an existential threat,” said Chris Miller, the vice president of sustainability at Aspen One, the parent company of Aspen Skiing Company.
One influential study projects that Colorado’s ski resorts could lose several weeks of winter by 2050 — and more than a month of winter by 2090 — even if the global community successfully curbs greenhouse gas emissions.
“From an absolute perspective, warming is not going to be great for snow in our mountains,” said Russ Schumacher, Colorado’s state climatologist.
Colorado’s $5 billion ski industry is watching — and preparing.
Industry giants are pouring millions of dollars into improving snowmaking to buffer against years when natural snow is scarce. Resorts of all sizes are expanding the parts of their businesses that don’t require snow — and pushing customers to buy passes and lift tickets before flakes begin to fly. Ultimately, studies show, shortened seasons could suck hundreds of millions of dollars from the West’s ski industry.
Beyond preparing for seasonal shifts, industry leaders have also been prompted by warming temperatures to consider their own responsibility to advocate for policies that address the underlying drivers of climate change. While some Colorado-based companies see it as their responsibility to publicly advocate for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, others have taken a quieter approach.
In a three-part series, The Denver Post is exploring all of those aspects of the impact of climate change on Colorado’s world-renowned ski industry — beginning with how scientists project warming will affect skiing in coming decades.
The impacts are already playing out. Average temperatures have risen more than 2 degrees statewide since 1980. This past December was the warmest on record, with temperatures more than 10 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average. As a whole, 2025 was the fourth-warmest year in Colorado since recordkeeping began in 1895.
Because of their relatively high elevations, Colorado’s ski areas will fare better in the near-term than resorts in California, on the East Coast and in other regions of the United States. Snow will continue to fall in Colorado’s mountains during the heart of winter for the foreseeable future.
But signs of change are already evident in the state’s mountains, particularly outside the core winter months, climate scientists said.
Colorado’s ski season has already begun to shorten.
“The season is going to get squeezed on both ends,” Schumacher said.
‘Things are going to get less predictable’
The precipitation shift — with more of it falling as rain, not snow — is already noticeable in the spring and fall, said Noah Molotch, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has studied mountain hydrology for more than 16 years at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
As average temperatures rise, the pattern will encroach into winter. Increased rain not only reduces the amount of snow available for skiing, Molotch said. When rain falls on snow, it speeds up melting.
Snow is now melting earlier in the year and melting faster — eating into spring skiing in April, Schumacher said.
“Things are going to get less predictable,” he said.
Scientists who analyzed the data trend lines said Colorado’s ski season could lose weeks of skiing within the next 25 years, even if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced.
A study published in the scientific journal Global Environmental Change in the last decade analyzed how ski season durations at resorts across the U.S. would change by 2050 and 2090 under two climate change scenarios. One scenario — dubbed “business as usual” — assumed greenhouse gas emissions from the use of fossil fuels would continue to grow. The other modeled a moderate-emissions future in which a global initiative succeeded in stabilizing emissions by 2050 and then began to reduce them.
The results varied widely by individual resort, by emissions scenario and by which climate model was applied. But nearly every model examined in the 2017 study showed Colorado ski resorts losing on average a month or more of skiing by 2050 if emissions continued to rise on a global scale. If emissions are reduced, days or weeks of skiing can be saved, according to the data.
Greenhouse gas emissions are currently tracking between the two scenarios examined in the study, said Cam Wobus, a scientist who studies climate change at the Boulder-based consulting group CK Blueshift.
Wobus earned a doctorate in earth sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as the lead author on the study, which was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a larger effort to quantify economic impacts of climate change across a variety of industries. The study is often cited by the ski industry and underpins many other analyses of climate change’s impact on the sector.
The differences between the two emissions scenarios are most significant past 2050, he said.
“Even if we stopped emitting everything today, there’s a lot of inertia in the system that is going to manifest itself regardless,” Wobus said.
An average of all the study’s models across all Colorado ski resorts projected, if emissions were reduced by mid-century, the loss of 23 days of skiing per ski area by 2050.
But if emissions continued to rise as modeled in the high-emission scenario, that number would rise to 34 days by 2050 and to 76 days by 2090.
The changes would affect some resorts more significantly than others.
Under a climate model with middle-of-the-road results for Colorado’s ski resorts, Winter Park would lose four days of skiing by 2050 in the medium-emissions scenario. With a base elevation more than 2,000 feet lower, Steamboat Springs would lose 43 days under the same conditions.
Multimillion-dollar impact
For the Colorado communities that rely on ski tourism, a low snow year can cause immediate financial pain. This year may give them a stark preview of the pain on the horizon as early-season snow becomes less reliable.
Vail’s Town Council, at its most recent meeting, brainstormed marketing messages to lure skiers and snowboarders to the town, even though a third of the ski resort’s terrain remained closed — including the resort’s famed Back Bowls. (Portions of the bowls would open a couple days later.)
One council member asked whether the governing body should do a snow dance.
Lodging cancellations and a projected revenue decrease from sale taxes and taxes charged on lift ticket sales already had punched a $4.5 million hole in the town’s projected revenue for the year, Carlie Smith, Vail’s finance director, said at the Feb. 3 meeting. The 5% reduction from expected budget revenues meant the town needed to cut its operating budget, hold vacant positions open and slash funding for capital projects.
Nearly all the would-be visitors who cancelled stays in the town cited a lack of snow, lodging operators told the town in a survey conducted at the end of January. When asked what the town could do to support the lodging industry, some put it bluntly.
“More snow,” one wrote. “We just need snow,” wrote another.
The lack of guests has resulted in a dearth of shoppers and diners in the town’s businesses and restaurants, said Mia Vlaar, the town’s economic development director.
“We can see that every day as we walk through the village or ski down the mountain,” she said.
Numerous studies have attempted to put a number on the economic impact climate change could wreak on the ski industry in the decades ahead.
An analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo found that climate change had already sapped six days from resorts’ seasons in the Rocky Mountain region, which includes Colorado.
The 2024 analysis from the Canadian university estimated that the region’s ski industry could lose up to $260 million in annual revenue by 2050 if emissions were moderately reined in. By 2080, the lost revenue could amount to $363 million.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise in a “business-as-usual” scenario, the cost to the region’s ski industry could swing as high as $894 million by 2080.
“The damage already done by anthropogenic climate change to the US ski industry is evident,” the study states. “We are probably past the era of peak ski seasons. … Even with advanced snowmaking, average ski seasons in all regional markets are projected to get shorter in the decades ahead under all emission futures.”
Wobus and his team, too, tried to quantify economic impacts in their 2017 study.
Nationally, under a moderate-emissions future and factoring in population growth, the study predicted 6.8 million fewer ski visits by 2050 — a loss of $345 million in lift ticket revenue. By 2090 that decrease could reach $3.2 billion.
Neither of the studies attempted to quantify other potential downstream impacts of climate change, like increased operational costs at resorts, reduced lodging rentals, real estate devaluations, and the loss of tax revenue and jobs in local communities. Wobus and his team accounted for regional population growth in their model, but it is difficult to quantify how often people will ski even as snow deteriorates.
“How much less snow do you need before people stop skiing? It’s hard to know,” he said. “Humans have to make decisions, and it’s hard to model how people will make decisions.”
Even one year of low snow makes staffing a resort challenging. This winter, several Colorado resorts slashed employee hours to respond to fewer visitors and less open terrain.
Arapahoe Basin, like many resorts, hires seasonal workers from all over the country for the winter. Uncertainty around conditions yields uncertainty around jobs, said Mike Nathan, the resort’s sustainability manager.
“It’s really hard to put a message out to 30 brand-new lifties from all over the country on when to show up at A-Basin when we don’t know when we’re going to open terrain and chairlifts,” he said.
A ‘Cascade concrete’ future for Colorado?
Warmer temperatures can also mean worse snow, along with increased snowmelt in the core months of winter, said Molotch, the CU professor.
Snow is melting more frequently between storms and making the snowpack less dry and fluffy — and more like the denser, heavier snow found in the Pacific Northwest, derisively nicknamed “Cascade concrete.”
“While I don’t think that we should imminently be concerned about the existence of our ski industry, what it means is the quality of the skiing is slowly deteriorating,” he said. “It’s a slow enough process that probably most ski resorts and their operations haven’t really been affected, or they may not even notice it. But the data don’t lie.”
The deterioration will be particularly noticeable for skiers in the backcountry.
Fewer skiers venture out of bounds, and there is no grooming machinery there, Molotch said. As melting snow becomes more common in December, January and February, powder won’t last as long — and snow will become crustier.
Mid-season melt will also contribute to decreases in total snowpack accumulation and the shortening of ski seasons.
When Molotch digs a snow pit while snowboarding in the backcountry, he notices evidence of mid-winter thawing. He sees melting snow on the surface and wonders about the future of the sport he loves.
“I was drawn to Colorado for snowboarding in the powder. That’s why I came here,” he said. “It’s sad to think that it’s slowly dwindling. It’s a reminder to go out and enjoy the snow as much as we can, but also to try and make changes in our energy sources so we can move away from increasing temperatures.”
Rocky Mountain resilience, for now
Compared to other parts of the United States — like the Sierra Nevada range in California or the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest — Colorado’s snowpack has been more insulated from climate change because of its higher elevation and greater distance from large bodies of water.
In the northern Sierra Nevada, snowpack ranged from 31% to 68% of the median in late January. Resorts in California delayed opening this season, too, and data show that if warming continues at the current rate, the average snowpack depth at Palisades Tahoe could fall from 80 inches in 2020 to less than 40 inches by 2070.
By 2050, rain is projected to become more likely in winter than snow at nearly all of the ski resorts around Lake Tahoe, according to the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at the University of California, Davis.
The other mountain ranges offer examples of what Colorado’s slopes could look like in the distant future, Molotch said.
At the current rate of warming, the buffers protecting Colorado’s snowpack — elevation and distance from water — will no longer be enough to ward off cataclysmic impacts to the snow that cannot be compensated for with snowmaking, Molotch said.
“If we fast-forward this to 100 to 200 years into the future, that’s where we start to think about really big impacts to the Colorado ski industry,” he said.
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