Sliding into the Future: A Reading List on Snowsports

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In the face of the climate crisis, few pastimes seem quite as frivolous (or doomed) as skiing and snowboarding. Paying through the nose to slide down mountains, even while the planet burns and the ice melts, is rather absurd. Why, exactly, do we care about this sport?

It’s simple, really. Frivolity is fun. Fun attracts people, and those people snowball into groups until a legitimate industry revolves around said frivolity—for better or worse. I’m one of those people. Despite growing up in an English county where the highest hill stands at a whopping 344 feet, I fell in love with skiing during a school trip to Austria, and ultimately moved to Vancouver, Canada, partly in pursuit of bountiful powder.

And I’m one of around 400 million who visit ski resorts (including indoor centers) annually; that’s nearly 5 percent of the planet’s population. The US ski market alone is worth an estimated $4.6 billion and is still growing, climate change be damned.

Skiing’s elitist reputation may be warranted, but it’s also not the whole story. When I ski back to my patchily converted 2005 GMC Savana, I remember that different versions of skiing exist. Frivolity is worth fighting for—for everyone. More importantly, skiing offers a unique perspective on a question that has shaped our present and will shape our future: how we interact with nature. 

Until recently ski culture has generally focused on joy, freedom, and conquest. But attitudes are diverging as the planet heats—and alpine environments warm faster than any other. Twice as fast, in the Swiss Alps. Hundreds of abandoned resorts now haunt Europe, and in the US ski seasons shortened by 34 days between 1982 and 2016. Skiing’s plight presents some of the starkest Western proof that the climate crisis is not our future, but our present. 

When normality breaks, calls for change commence. But what does adaptation look like for winter sports? Technological innovation, in the shape of giant snow blankets and thirsty snow machines? Reoriented business models and environmental practices? Elitism and corporate consolidation? Activism and democratic accountability? New ways of sliding?

Skiing is not an escape, but a practice rooted in and reflective of society. How the ski world balances competing interests in its responses to these threats will shape livelihoods, landscapes, health outcomes, cultural attitudes, and political possibilities—beyond just ski towns. Skiing is a bellwether, a dress rehearsal, a microcosm. 

The outdoor community is starting to take note. Climate change, mental health, and diversity are now common themes in ski media. This is welcome, but much work remains to connect individual stories and collective passion for adventure with systemic change. As the Northern Hemisphere’s ski season draws to a close and the Southern Hemisphere’s season approaches, I present these pieces with this possibility in mind.

Can Skiing Survive on a Warming Planet? (Simon Willis, 1843, January 2022)

Snowfall is falling, in the worst possible sense. In Europe, snowpack depth has decreased by 8.4 percent per decade since 1971. The industry’s most visible response has been technological. Resorts are furiously making fake snow and painstakingly preserving real snow.

For 1843, Simon Willis tells this story through snow-obsessed Finn Mikko Martikainen—a man who once convinced a doctor to set the bones of his broken wrist “in the form of a loose fist so he could continue to grasp a ski pole.” Now one of the world’s leading snow consultants, advising resorts and the Sochi (2014) and Beijing (2022) Winter Olympics, Martikainen has graduated from sliding on snow to conjuring it out of dry air.

In Beijing, the problem isn’t heat but drought. Yanqing, where the alpine ski races will be held, gets an average of 5cm of snow a year; the chance of a flurry during the games will hover around 1%. The barren hillsides are more likely to be dusted by sand blowing in from the Gobi desert than by snow.

The chosen solution to this self-imposed problem, Willis reports in this piece published before the Beijing games, will be snow machines. To affirm the sense of sanctioned insanity, he explains that “in the hillsides outside Beijing, water is as scarce as it is in South Sudan.” European examples further bolster the case.

Ski resorts have used snow machines for decades. They aren’t always so terrible—when water is drawn from responsible sources and melts back into waterways. Nevertheless, this piece outlines the business-as-usual future of skiing, in which problems are innovated away, to just beyond the resort boundary. A future, as one source puts it, of every ski resort “trying to make itself independent of nature.”

Europe’s First ‘Lift Free’ Ski Resort (Tristan Kennedy, FT Magazine, October 2023)

We can discern an alternative future in the recent rise of backcountry skiing: in the US, “skinning,” or walking with sticky ski pads uphill to ski lines without resort access, has more than tripled since 2020. Higher ticket prices, busier resorts, COVID-19, and popular backcountry films have all contributed. The result is more skiers seeking a slower, more attuned mountain experience.

For FT Magazine, Tristan Kennedy travels to the Italian village of Montespluga. Four hotels once served a bustling ski community here, with skiers arriving on horse-drawn sleighs whenever snow closed the road to cars.

By the early 1980s, however, numbers had dwindled. The other hotels shut down, one by one, the draglift was dismantled and Montespluga in winter became something of a ghost town. Until the arrival of Homeland.

Homeland represents an interesting facet of the backcountry trend: the flickering dawn of lift-free ski “resorts.” Hankin-Evelyn, here in British Columbia, has been quietly pioneering a rustic model for years, captured in this short Salomon TV film. Bluebird, the first lift-free resort in the US, opened to positive press in 2020 (though it closed in 2023 due to a struggle to find suitable long-term land). Lift-free resorts will never replace traditional ones. But in contrast to the myopic techno-optimism of snow production, they propose a low-impact response to the climate crisis—one rooted in a logic of sufficiency. It’s a space worth watching.

The Rescue Artists of the New Avalanche Age (Joshua Hammer, GQ, January 2022)

One consequence of the backcountry boom, in conjunction with climate change making avalanche conditions more volatile and challenging to predict, is the increased risk of fatalities. 

The microphone dangled on a cord extending from his backpack. But he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t move his arms. He lay immobile, struggling to breathe for about three minutes. Then everything faded to black.

So relays Joshua Hammer for GQ in this harrowing account of a Swiss avalanche incident. Hammer recounts the rescue attempt as if in real time, punctuated by timestamps marking the minutes—each reducing the survival odds—since the victim’s burial. 

The piece captures the spectacular illusion of tranquility on a bluebird powder day. Crucially, it also articulates the silence of an avalanche’s aftermath—when buried under snow—as well as its trigger moment. “You hear that crack and the silence while nature holds its breath, waiting for the mountain to go,” says one alpinist, who has lost multiple friends to avalanches. “Even the birds go quiet. You can feel your breath thundering in your ears.”

Ultimately, the story conveys how proper training, quality kit, excellent decision-making, and good luck will all continue to be vital in the backcountry—even with the world’s most storied rescue operation within radio range.

Rescuing the Rescuer: Saving Myself from a Lifetime of Hurt (Cathleen Calkins, Longreads, January 2024)

At age 33, Cathleen Calkins fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a ski patroller. But, in this personal essay for Longreads, she tells the story of how through skiing and helping people every day, her “dreams became nightmares.”

As I experienced both trivial and traumatic moments day after day, an emotional narrative emerged, and I began to confront the falsehood that I too would be okay. My thinning confidence overshadowed my passion to rescue others, and seven years into my career, I became terrified to do my job.

Calkins offers a vulnerable account of the incidents that chiseled away her well-being, the culture of qualified bravado that suppressed the symptoms, and the fear, despair, and breakdown that resulted. Coming from the rescuer’s perspective—the red-jacketed hero, ever poised and in control—it hits all the harder.

The future emerges from this history in Calkins’ advocacy for a ski culture more attuned to shadow, pain, and trauma. It also lurks in her depiction of how skiing—that frivolous pastime—can snap futures into pieces. And it runs through her reflections on the way skiing, like other pursuits that give young people “freedom, autonomy, and power,” presents a manner of moving into the future, motivations and misdirections included.

The Socialist Case for Skiing (Richard Michael Solomon, Current Affairs, April 2021)

Socialism and skiing seem unlikely bedfellows today, but it hasn’t always been so. This fantastic Current Affairs essay by Richard Michael Solomon opens with an old German man in a chairlift, holding forth on the prospect of skiing under fully automated luxury communism. Inspired, Solomon traces the history of skiing from its egalitarian European roots, through a postwar wave of social-democratic skiing projects, and into late capitalism’s Ski Inc. oligopoly. 

Ski Inc. is what many will recognize as skiing today, especially in the US: giant corporates like Vail and Alterra gobbling up hills; bumper multi-resort season passes and stratospheric day-ticket prices ($299 in some places) incentivizing yearlong commitments as a hedge against climate change; and ski towns morphing into “aristocrats’ Potemkin villages” of empty chalets, splashy stores, and olde tyme simulacra. Stuart Winchester, Substack’s leading ski journalist, recently (and provocatively) made the point that not all good ski resorts match this description. True enough, but the slide toward consolidation and luxury continues.

Solomon goes further, searching for more radical models. He recommends existing nonprofit and community-owned ski projects. He proposes taxes, more taxes, revenue sharing, and a Public Lands Fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. He also calls for politicization:

Skiers, river rats, scuba people, dirt-bags, surfer bros, biker girls, cavers, bird fanatics, anglers, hiking vagabonds—we are a powerful voter bloc and possess sizable consumer power. Given that the natural world is under relentless assault by a pollutive and commodifying force, the outdoor community must become thoroughly politicized.

Solomon’s vision is fanciful, by his own admission. But fanciful ideas are often so from a political perspective, not a practical one. Fatalism, he argues, is worse than fancy:

On the chairlift, I recall Hans told me that our modern social order is like concrete. To sledgehammer the thing is brutish and unlikely to do much, but to sandpaper the edges is inadequate. For this reason, such ski dreams of his may seem like an exercise in pointless fantasy—fated “to bleach on the plains of the past under a hallucinated utopian sun,” wrote British Marxist E.P. Thompson. But in the boom-bust rhythms, small cracks in that concrete will form. There, radical projects can sink their roots.

Translating the Ineffable: Lakota Skier Connor Ryan Explores Indigenous Language and its Pertinence to Skiing (Matthew Tufts, Freeskier, January 2023)

As society undergoes an ecological turn, parts of the ski community are turning the same way. In both cases, Indigenous voices have much to contribute—if we can learn to listen. I love Matthew Tufts’ Freeskier profile of Lakota skier Connor Ryan, a modern shredder spreading ancient wisdom, as a step in this direction.

“Dude, I just want to pop up like the little Microsoft Office paperclip and tell other skiers, ‘Oh hey there! It sounds like you’re having trouble describing your connection to nature,’ [Ryan] said with an exasperated laugh between bites of ahi poke ceviche. Our guide to alpine reverence wore a basketball jersey and backwards cap with long braided hair snaking out from the brim. He pointed at us with a tortilla chip. ‘Bro, what if I told you Native cultures have had words for that for thousands of years?”

The piece hangs around a series of Indigenous phrases, each encouraging a reciprocal, animistic, grateful relationship with nature—for skiers and others. It is a paean to the power of language.

Language is not only a tool for communicating intentions and relaying our actions, but also serves as a pillar in the framework of our interpretation of the world and its people. It’s largely held that a people defines its language; it is less frequently acknowledged that a language reciprocally shapes its people.

Skiing is not the most diverse world, so representation is important. But when abstracted from different communities’ perspectives and particularities, representation can feel tokenistic—especially within marketing campaigns. Not this profile. In focusing on Ryan’s linguistic insights and ritualistic practices—singing songs, and burning sweetgrass—the piece is artful in its articulation of diverse ways of thinking and being.

Connor isn’t out to alter the experience skiers already have with the mountains; rather, he sees an opportunity, through language, to enhance the depth and perspective of these experiences in a way that cultivates a healthier reciprocal relationship between skiers, the land and the Indigenous peoples upon whose land we so often recreate. He hopes to bring some of these Indigenous terms into the skier’s vernacular, integrating long-standing cultural practices into our daily experiences on the mountain. In doing so, the ski community can adopt a new understanding of, and appreciation for, our relationship with the natural world.

5 Reasons Our Community Does Not Genuinely Engage (Calum Macintyre, Looking Sideways, June 2023)

To close, a piece that is less literary long-form and more a realist rallying cry. Scottish snowboarder Calum Macintyre is one of the sport’s most outspoken environmental activists. Matt Barr’s Looking Sideways Substack, for which this is a guest post, is one of the most thoughtful corners of the snowsports world. (Macintyre also just appeared on the Looking Sideways podcast, discussing the same themes).

Having been involved in the climate movement for some years, I have often been asked by people who have no interest in snow sports or climbing, ‘Where the hell are all of you?’ I have found it difficult to respond to this question. In this piece, I will present my five reasons why I believe our community is not more engaged and why I think more of us should participate in disruptive protests.

I love the simple, direct provocation of this piece. It asks all of us with an affinity for the outdoors to ask some honest questions: Are we doing what we can to protect the environments we cherish? If not, why not? What are the most effective actions we can take? These questions are increasingly animating both ski communities and wider society. Their consequences will come for skiers first—but will catch us all in the end.

Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin