by Cassandra Profita Follow OPB/EarthFix Jan. 5, 2016 5:30 p.m. | Updated: Jan. 11, 2016 5:19 p.m.
After a warm and dry fall season, the Mount Hood Meadows staff adds snow harvested from the parking lot to runs and chairlifts.
On the eve of opening day at Mount Hood Meadows, the ski resort sounded like a construction site.
A front-end loader scooped snow from the parking lot, its over-sized tire chains chinking as it crossed the pavement and emptied its load into a rubber-tracked dump truck. After a few more scoops, both machines rumbled toward a nearby chairlift to drop their haul.
In the ski industry, they call this “snow harvesting”: Moving snow from the parking lots to the lower lifts and slopes so people can start skiing sooner.
The operations crew at Mount Hood Meadows moves snow from the parking lot to the lifts and slopes.
Mt. Ashland built a deck around its chairlift so people can ride it with just an inch of snow on the ground.
Washington’s Stevens Pass ski area bought its first snow gun last year.
The operations crew at Mount Hood Meadows moves snow from the parking lot to the lifts and slopes. Snowpack levels are much higher than expected at this time of year thanks to a batch of heavy storms.
. He’s also an avid backcountry skier.
In the past, Stevenson says, Little Nash has been a convenient ski spot because it’s not too far from his home in Corvallis, and it’s close to the highway that crosses the Cascades at Santiam Pass.
John Stevenson and his dog Apollo at Little Nash Sno-Park in Willamette National Forest.
That is, the snow is at risk of turning to rain with a couple degrees of warming, making it more vulnerable to climate change.
With so little snow at lower elevations the past few years, Stevenson has had to make longer treks to find backcountry ski areas.
Finding higher terrain may be the key to future snow sports, according to Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.
At higher elevations, he says, temperatures are cold enough that a couple degrees of warming doesn’t change snow into rain. That means ski resorts could experience different effects of climate change depending on their elevation.
Last year, warmer winter temperatures meant there was very little snow below 5,000 feet. He says that’s what climate models predict for the average winter by the 2040s.
“So ski resorts like Bachelor with a very high base elevation were relatively fine because most of the precipitation was falling as snow up that high, but at lower elevations most of the precipitation was falling as rain,” he said.
Mote hasn’t given up on skiing in the future – even though he recognizes that some areas likely won’t have as much snow as they used to.
Hiking to higher ground on Brokentop Mountain.
that found declining mountain snow pack in 70 percent of the Western U.S. locations scientists observed from 1916-1997.
“The largest decreases are at lower elevations at very mild temperatures where you’d expect a transition from snowfall to rainfall with a little bit of warming,” he said.
Snow guns supplement natural snow at Mount Hood SkiBowl.
SkiBowl’s alpine slide offers summertime fun on the ski slopes.