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I was 12 years old when I got my first job selling “Team Big Bear” T-shirts at a booth during one of the mountain bike races that took over Snow Summit ski resort each summer.
When the snow came that fall, I went back to the resort to rent lockers to skiers and snowboarders who needed to stash their belongings while they hit the slopes. We’d sing along to Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” which radio stations played on a steady loop that winter. And we’d talk about plans to grab our boards and jump on a lift ourselves as soon as we punched the clock.
The great Richard Attenborough released a documentary a few years ago called “A Life on Our Planet,” which he called a “witness statement” about how ecosystems around the world have been transformed by climate change over his 93 years. So when I saw there was a study by Dartmouth researchers that looked at how climate change has impacted snowfall across the Northern Hemisphere since 1980, when I was born, I knew it was time for a witness statement of my own that attempted to answer a question that’s been on my mind for some time: Can Southern California ski resorts survive climate change?
My childhood in Big Bear was winters with snow piled so high that we built tunnels and forts in our front yard. We’d cheer when the local TV channel flashed the news that school was canceled, then grab our sleds and head for the hills behind the post office in Fawnskin. One winter in high school, a friend and I grabbed our snowboards and hoofed it uphill in deep powder to ride at the old Snow Forest Ski Area, which had shut down a few years earlier.
Sure, some winters were whiter than others. But the arrival of snow always felt as inevitable as the avalanche of “flatlanders” who’d come chasing after it.
Anecdotally — to me and to my family, who still lives in Big Bear, and to many long-time residents of the area — the snow just doesn’t feel quite as inevitable anymore. And the Dartmouth study explained why, with data showing that spring snowpack has dropped by up to 40% in parts of the Southwest over my lifetime.
More worrisome, lead researcher Alex Gottlieb explained how this trend accelerates exponentially with each degree of global warming. “So that first degree might take 5 to 10% of your snowpack on average. But that second degree, it’s going to take 10 to 15%, and then the next 15 to 20%.” Absent drastic measures to halt global warming, Gottlieb told me, climate models show there will likely be little to no snow in our local mountains by the end of the century.
Gottlieb’s team tackled this research in hopes of giving folks a warning, so they can plan for water systems and economies and lifestyles that will almost certainly include much less snow down the road. That’s why I wanted to write this story, too. Not to scare anyone or to be a downer, but in hopes of informing residents and leaders of my hometown and other mountain towns in our region so they can plan for the wild weather swings climate change has already ushered in and what the models say will come. I’ve said it in this newsletter before: Ignorance is bliss but knowledge is power.
More summer and shoulder season activities, like the mountain bike races that have long helped lure tourists to town when the snow doesn’t beckon and give locals like 12-year-old me jobs, is a great start. There are more concerts and festivals in town now, which Big Bear Lake City Manager Erik Sund told me is part of a focused effort to maintain a solid level of tourism throughout the year.
One thing that surprised me in reporting this story was that ski resorts haven’t become more vocal advocates in the fight against climate change, which is threatening their very existence all over the globe. Industry trade groups such as the National Ski Areas Association and outdoor gear companies are doing some of this work. But local resort and state industry representatives told me they see it as a global issue, outside their wheelhouse, and that California is already a leader in this space.
As one reader responded: “When it hits them in the pocketbook, they will pay attention.”
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