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The North Shore mountains of Vancouver were formed from an ice shelf 15 thousand years ago. Climate scientists believe that B.C.’s winter legacy is now in danger.’s coast mountains are on the verge of collapse.
This is the first story in a two-part series looking at the impact of climate change on B.C. ski hills. Click here for the second part. Here.
If you had stood on any Vancouver summit on a bluebird day 15 millennia earlier, you would have been at eye level with the blanket of ice 1.5 kilometres up the sky.
If you watched long enough, you might notice signs of a frozen world already fading — a rivulet of water at your feet, a thundering crack below you.
A trigger, likely a natural drift in the planet’s orbit around the sun, had launched a great melt. The ice sheets that had engulfed most of North America, Europe, and Asia were slowly retreating to their Arctic and alpine sources.
A few thousand years earlier, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet had spilled from British Columbia’s mountain ranges, covering nearly the entire province. It was now pulling back from continental shelf. As it passed over Vancouver Island, large chunks of ice sank into the Salish Sea. The Fraser Valley was flooded by a flood of biblical proportions as a result of ice dams that had been blocking the largest lake in the province.
The world was opening up.
On B.C.’s south coast, the heavy ice had sunk the continent into the Earth’s upper mantle, raising sea levels hundreds of metres higher than today; but on the north coast, that weight created an offshore bulge of ice-free land, where humans and open forests were penned into now underwater refuges. As the walls of ice retreated, those people — along with soon-to-be-extinct imperial mammoths, ground sloth and giant bison — filled a barren landscape emerging from a long winter.
“It would have been pretty spectacular,” said geologist John Clague, picturing the scene atop a 1,450-metre peak at Cypress Mountain Ski Resort. “I would have loved to be a fly on Mount Strachan.”
Global temperatures rose as high as 8 C in a geological wink. This was enough to allow for the rise in agriculture, urbanization, and 10,000 years worth of human civilization. But while humans flourished, the pattern was clear — it would not last forever. The planet was slowly cooling back.
“We should be seeing a gradual slide into the next glaciation,” Clague said. “We should be, but we’re not.”
SKI HILLS A EARLY CLIMATE CASUALTY
Eduardo Huertas was there for the snow. Vancouver was for Eduardo Huertas, a Spanish-American who had spent his life hopping between Europe and the U.S. Vancouver was his escape from a life that had fallen apart around him. An oceanside city crowned with three ski resorts — for him, it embodied freedom, a life with one foot “on the verge of civilization.”
“It’s not as good as I thought it’d be,” he recently told me as we creaked to the summit of Mount Strachan on Sky Chair, an old two-seater lift.
Below us, a steep stretch caught between two conifer groves was bathed with ice.
The marginal conditions were the latest of an unpredictable season. November rains had caused severe flooding in the province. When they receded, the snow line also melted. On Dec. 3, unseasonably warm temperatures — including a Canadian record of 22.5 C in the town of Penticton — prompted Environment Canada to warn of flooding across the province as snowpacks melted.
To get snow on B.C.’s coastal mountains requires the right mix of storm systems tracking in from the North Pacific and cold outbursts of arctic air.
As the planet heats up, this mix is under threat. Mountains lying closest to the ocean will be the first to feel the impacts of weakened arctic air and the growing influence of a warming ocean.
The atmospheric rivers that swept through B.C. The atmospheric rivers that hit B.C. last fall were more common south than the U.S. border where winters start later, and snowpack is already vanishing.
As Faron Anslow, a climate scientist with the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC), put it to me, as climate change advances, “California is kind of creeping to the north.”
It will still snow. Over Christmas last year, the temperature dropped, piling thick drifts of powder snow on Vancouver’s North Shore mountains, only to later melt in over a week of rain. Mid-February, which was supposed to be peak season for skiers, saw little snow fall in just a few weeks.
Anslow predicts that such extremes in climate will only get more pronounced in the future.
It is now 15 000 years since the North Shore Mountains emerged from a seaof ice and its ski resorts are set to be among the first victims of another climate tipping point.
THE END OF WINTER, AS WE KNOW IT
Many British Columbians are trying to forget 2015’s ski season. At Whistler Blackcomb, crews blasted the Horstman Glacier with snow guns in an attempt to slow its decline; at Cypress Mountain, resort operators cobbled together an Amazingly thin, winding paths of snow before closing altogether in February.
“It was the worst season they’ve ever seen,” said Michael Pidwirny, an associate professor in environmental science at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
It was also a season that made climate scientists question the future. Scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions have caused the world to warm by 1.2 C since 1880. But when Pidwirny pulled 118 years of mean winter temperature data at Cypress Mountain, he found an “obvious warming trend” of 1.5 C.
“If Cypress had seen 25 per cent more warming than the global average, how was it going to survive into the future?” questioned Pidwirny and his graduate students Ethan Clark and Kalim Bahbahani.
In a study presented at the American Geophysical UnionThe researchers modelled the future climate of 154 resorts across Western North America. Later, they focused on 12 B.C. Resorts, from Vancouver Island up to the Rocky Mountains.
The result: dozens of British Columbia’s ski hills face precipitous drops in snowfallOver the coming decades, as a warming Pacific Ocean changes regional weather patterns.
The coast is the area where future snowfall will be most severe. There, maritime influences are expected turn snow into rain. A worst-case scenario for emissions would see mean temperatures exceeding zero Celsius by mid-century at ski hills such as Mount Washington, Cypress, and Sasquatch Mountain Resort in Chilliwack.
By then, Pidwirny’s modelling suggests the 2015 season will become the average — meaning from year to year, half of future seasons are predicted to be even warmer.
Describing mountain climate as “the canary in the coal mine,” Pidwirny is among many scientists warning of the cascading impacts a disappearing snowpack could have on a long list of species that rely on the cool waters to live through the summer — not least of all, humans.
However, snow is also a key ingredient in a ski industry worth billions of dollars each year. The researchers’ projections spell the potential end of a way of life for thousands of coastal British Columbians who take the mantra “hit the slopes and beach in one day” seriously.
“For the coastal resorts, by 2050, it’ll be really hard to have a sustainable ski business,” said Pidwirny. “There’ll be so many years where it’s just too warm and too wet, too rainy to ski.”
A RACE TO ADAPT
What are resorts doing to combat it?
Glacier Media contacted six coastal resorts in southwestern British Columbia to understand how they are planning to survive increasingly mild winters.
Mount Seymour and Cypress, two resorts on the coast, have made significant investments in snowmaking equipment and offseason run grooming to compensate for the expected decrease in snowfall over the next decades.
Over the past five years, Mount Seymour has spent the off-season dumping at least 3,000 truckloads of dirt on ski runs to smooth out the surface below. That allows it to operate with “significantly less snow,” Seymour Mountain spokesperson Simon Whitehead told Glacier Media in an email.
“We have diversified, and will continue to diversify, to allow Mt. Seymour Resort to operate year-round,” he said.
Cypress Mountain Ski Resort took on a new look last summer, after the resort opened a 1.7-kilometre-long “mountain coaster.” Whipping visitors through forested vistas at 40 kilometres per hour, it has been billed as Canada’s longest.
Last summer, the resort made ski runs “look like a golf course” so it could open without much snow. To increase snowmaking capacity by 40% on Mount Strachan (the highest of the three peaks), it has added 15 snow guns.
“With the right temperature, we can go from green to white overnight. And with a few days of snowmaking can get ski runs open,” said Joffrey Koeman, Cypress Mountain Resort’s director of sales and marketing.
When asked what threshold will make a winter business impossible at Seymour, Whitehead said “there are too many variables” and it’s “impossible to say.”
Experts are divided on the extent to which snowmaking can delay increasingly poor winters.
Professor of geography and environmental management at University of Waterloo Daniel Scott is one of a few researchers who are trying to understand the winners of a ski industry that is on the edge of an existential crisis.
At the global level, he recently found that if carbon output follows today’s trend, Sapporo (Japan), would be the only city out of 21 past Winter Olympic hosts that could hold a reliable, safe and fair Games again by the end of the century. Vancouver’s return to the Olympics would be a sign of a strong Olympic future. Conditions marginalIncluding February rain and wet, up to half the time
One thing is certain: There is a 100 percent chance that machine-made snow will occur.
2014 saw an estimated 80 percent of the snow needed for the Sochi, Russia Games. artificial. In Pyeongchang, South Korea, the percentage rose past 90 per cent. This year’s games in Beijing, China, has pushed the manufacturing of Olympic snow to a new high: early competitions relied on 100 per cent fake snow.
Scott believes snowmaking can be a great way to keep mountains open in marginal conditions. However, the conditions must be perfect. Snowflakes are formed from water vapour in air. Snowmaking machines, also known as snow guns, pump large amounts of water through high pressured nozzles.
A traditional snow gun is hooked up to two hoses, one feeding it water from a series of underground pipes, and another compressed air. The high-pressured atmosphere then atomizes water molecules and blasts them into the air. Other snow guns use fans instead of compressed air.
Temperature matters and the threshold for efficient snowmaking is around -5 C, though chemical or biological additives can provide a larger buffer closer to 0 C. In the end, what falls aren’t perfect snowflakes but icy granules closer in appearance to salt than a fresh dusting of powdery snow.
Beijing is a place where water is scarce and green energy sources are limited. This raises a lot of questions about the sustainability of these resources. SustainabilityMaking snow. However, in places like B.C. Scott claims that there are vast hydroelectricity reserves in Quebec and B.C., making it more feasible.
“You could double or triple the snowmaking and it will mean nothing in terms of carbon emissions,” said Scott.
When does it stop making sense to pay twice as much for snowmaking operations? Scott stated that only ski resort owners can answer that question. When Glacier Media asked, neither Seymour nor Cypress Mountain ski resorts had any projections showing how far snowfalls would need to decline before snowmaking couldn’t keep up.
A spokesperson for Mount Washington, Grouse and Sasquatch resorts — among those expected to be hardest hit — did not respond to questions from Glacier Media.
Temperature and cost aren’t the only limiting factors. Pidwirny notes that the ability to blast runs with snow-made by humans is also affected depending on how moist the air is. He is skeptical about putting too much faith into snowmaking.
“[Scott] thinks that we can solve all our problems by snowmaking,” Pidwirny said. “It’s easy to make snow when it doesn’t snow much or doesn’t precipitate much out east. But in these warmer years that I’m talking about in the future… there will be this threshold that you hit.
“Snowmaking just doesn’t work anymore if there are too many warm, wet days.”
The UBC researcher says that efforts to preserve a rapidly disappearing winter season without major global emission reductions by 2080s will almost certainly fail.
“Those areas are for sure finished,” said Pidwirny. “I see all the ski resorts in Western Canada just putting their head in the sand like an ostrich. They’re trying to, you know, ‘let’s not talk about it. Maybe it’s not going to happen.’”
As the ski lift rose higher, I thought back to the message Faron Anslow, climate scientist, had left me earlier that day.
“When we get these warm maritime atmospheric river events,” he had said, “only the highest mountains are going to see snow.”
The summit of Mount Strachan was clearly visible. There was no ice shelf, no thick dump of powder — just the steady whir of the old German machinery.
Huertas and I shifted out of our seats. Our snowboards and skis rolled down an icy ramp.
Below us, it was night. The surrounding mountains were bathed in darkness, but the resort’s twin peaks glowed under fluorescent lighting, a spectacular sight framed by Metro Vancouver’s nightscape flickering into the horizon.
“What a place to live,” said Huertas.
Curious about the future of B.C. Are you curious about how B.C. Part two Here.
Stefan Labbé is a solutions journalist. That means he covers how people are responding to problems linked to climate change — from housing to energy and everything in between. Have a story idea to share? Get in touch. Email [email protected].
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