Over the holidays, I went on a ski trip with my family. My parents are both original ski bums, and they raised my siblings and I in that image, putting us each on a pair of skis as soon as we could stand. Naturally, this translated to family vacations taking place wherever the snow fell. We booked the aforementioned trip to Utah – Snowbird, Alta, Brighton, and Deer Valley ski resorts. When the plane touched down in Utah, it was late at night, and the darkness obscured views of the mountains.
I woke up on what was to be our first day of skiing to a view outside my window of bleak, brown mountains, showing no evidence of snowfall. I had hoped that climbing higher would reveal that there was, in fact, snow, but as my family drove deeper into the canyon, the mountains remained bare. Each day of the trip, we ventured to a new mountain, and repeatedly, my hopes of deep powder were dashed.
Several of the resorts were creating artificial snow with machines planted in the mountainside, but still, rocks, sticks, and dirt prevailed, showing through a sheen of grayish-white coverage. On each mountain, only 1-2 lifts were running, and everyone spilled out onto just a few open runs.
A 2025 article from Earth.org stated, “2024 was the warmest year on record, which explains the urgent need for machine-made snow to keep the ski season running on its normal schedule. Machines that once only generated 41% of ski areas across the Midwest and Northeast now assist 89% of ski areas across the country.”
Although the weather was unseasonably warm and the snow was nightmarish, I was grateful to be skiing at all, as it had not yet snowed at all in Washington at the time. Still, the trip was a stark contrast to my prior experience skiing in Utah, where I had been overwhelmed with the quality of the snow. In between runs, I began to reflect on my ski career, from my youth to the present. When I was a kid, winter would begin shortly after Halloween. This year, as we have neared February, conditions have only allowed for a few good ski days.
Our late-blooming winter and the abysmal snow in Utah felt like a personal wake-up call to the future caused by global warming. I am vocal about the present danger of climate change, I take public transportation when I can, and I try my best to support brands that center on sustainability. However, riding on the chairlifts in Utah and getting a bird’s-eye view of the raw, muddy mountains gave me an entirely new perspective on the direness of the climate crisis.
I want future generations to experience the joy of a remarkable ski day. I have been living within the comfortable illusion that the climate is not worsening with each day, but the Earth does not deserve my ignorance, and we cannot afford for all to have a personal wake-up call. Going forward, I want to learn from organizations like Protect Our Winters (POW), a nonprofit that provides climate education and opportunities to engage in large-scale advocacy. POW draws me as an organization because it was the first organization of its kind to operate within the outdoor community, but there are a myriad of other local and global groups doing important work fostering honest conversations about how to protect our planet.