Winter sports are on thin ice - this snowboarder wants to keep his future

Aside from these swaths of glistening white snow, the mountains, which reach heights of more than 2,000 meters (6,500 feet), are arid and covered in brown scrub. Beijing 2022 will be the first Winter Olympics to rely almost entirely on fake snow, which some athletes have warned could create dangerous, icy conditions.

But it’s unlikely to be the last, as the climate crisis is shrinking our winters. If global greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory, only one of the 21 venues from the previous Winter Olympics will have enough snow and ice to reliably host the Games by the end of the century, according to a recent study by the United Nations. University of Waterloo, Canada.

One of these locations is Squaw Valley, in the Sierra Nevada, California, where the 1960 Winter Olympics were held. Now known as Palisades Tahoe, it is one of the local resorts for professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones.

A legend of big mountain freeriding — who has earned Snowboarder Magazine the title of Big Mountain Snowboarder of the Year 11 times — Jones has spent much of his life on top of mountains, cutting off their steepest faces too with a spray of powder in his wake. Over his three-decade career, he has experienced first-hand the effects of climate change.

Jones says he’s watched it rain on mountaintops in the dead of winter and glaciers disappear over time. “Winters often start later, end earlier, and (there are) just more extremes of everything,” he says. “We get half a season of snow in three days and then we have two months without snow.”

Shrinking Seasons

A similar scenario occurred this winter. In late November, when Lake Tahoe’s ski lifts normally open, the sun was shining and temperatures soared to 14 degrees Celsius — 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal for that time of year. The following month, 202 inches of snow — nearly 5.2 meters long — was dumped into the region, closing roads and resorts and making it the snowiest December on record.

Research suggests that these bizarre weather patterns show no signs of abating and that the seasons as we know them are in flux. A recent report in the journal Nature estimates that it could be as little as 35 years before winters in the western U.S. regularly have little or no snow. A 2017 study from the University of Colorado that looked at the impact of climate change on winter sports in the US suggests that by 2050, the ski season will be halved for most regions.

Wanting his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to experience snowy winters, Jones felt compelled to act. “I saw changes in the winter and it affected my lifestyle,” he says. “But over time I started to notice that the effects far outweigh my lifestyle. It’s not just my livelihood, but all these mountain communities around winter and snow.”

To bring the winter sports community together as a unified voice on climate change, he founded Protect Our Winters in 2007. The charity lobbies governments around the world for stronger climate policies and today has a network of more than 130,000 supporters.

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The cost of no snow

In 2017, Jones went from wearing ski pants on the slopes to a suit on Capitol Hill, as he was called to testify before Congress about the impact of climate change on the snowsports community.

Citing a report from the Outdoor Industry Association, Jones told lawmakers that the U.S. snowsports industry generates $72 billion annually and supports 695,000 jobs. These jobs are increasingly under threat, with the industry losing an estimated $1 billion in low-snow years and more than 17,000 jobs per season.

Jones has gone from snowboarder to political lobbyist, speaking before Congress in 2017 and in the Senate in 2019 (pictured).

But the economic costs are just the tip of the iceberg. Less snow puts plants and animals at risk, such as voles and mice, which rely on it as a protective blanket against freezing temperatures. It’s endangering water supplies — California, for example, relies on snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains for 75% of its agricultural water, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Less snow means further global warming, explains Anne Nolin, a University of Nevada snow hydrologist and member of the Protect Our Winter science alliance. Because snow is white, it reflects most of the sunlight that hits it, but when it melts and exposes the ground beneath, that dark surface absorbs solar energy.

“In recent decades, snow layers have started to melt earlier and earlier, so we have a drier, dry season,” she adds, which could lead to serious wildfires, such as the 2021 Caldor fire that devastated the Tahoe Basin. Wildfires exacerbate the situation, she says, destroying the canopy that normally covers the snow, meaning it melts sooner.

save snow

Despite what Nolin describes as “this great vicious circle,” she has hope for the future. “Nature is resilient and things grow back,” she says, explaining that more effective management of forests can help preserve snow cover.

Less snow has been linked to wildfires, such as the Caldor Fire, which damaged the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski area in California.

“If you open up the forest to some extent, you can increase the snow that accumulates on the ground because it doesn’t get trapped in the canopy,” she says. “And if you can maintain a healthy forest with a healthy canopy around those gaps by the time spring sets in, that forest can continue to shade the snowpack, perhaps making it last longer.”

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Jones hopes policymakers will seek solutions, such as renewable energy, that will reduce emissions and mitigate climate change.

A Winter Olympics without real snow illustrates the future predicament of snow sports, but Jones emphasizes that the impact is much greater than that.

“The work I do is for future generations, so hopefully I can look at my children and grandchildren and say, you know what? I got this opportunity and did everything I could to get us on the right path — so not only you can slide on snow, but you have a healthy planet,” he says.