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Squaw Valley in California’s Sierra Nevada is one of these locations. It hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics. It is now known as Palisades Tahoe and is home to professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones.
Jones is a legend in big-mountain snowboarding, earning Snowboarder Magazine’s Big Mountain Snowboarder Of The Year title 11 times. He has spent much his life climbing mountains and leaving behind a trail of powder. He has seen the effects of climate change firsthand over his three-decade long career.
Jones claims he has seen it rain on mountain peaks during the dead of winter, and watched glaciers recede over the years. “Winters are often ending earlier, starting later and (there are) just as extremes of everything,” Jones says. “We’ll get half of a season’s worth in snow in three days, and then we’ll have two months without any snow.”
Shrinking seasons
Jones wanted his great-grandchildren, and grandchildren, to have snowy winters. Jones says, “I was seeing changes in winter and it affected me lifestyle.” “But over time, I began to notice that the impacts are much greater than my lifestyle. It’s not just me, it’s all these mountain communities that revolve around winter and/or snow.
Protect Our Winters was established by Robert in 2007 to bring together winter sports enthusiasts and make them a united voice on climate changes. The charity lobbying governments around the world for stronger policies on climate change has over 130,000 supporters.
The cost of having no snow
Jones changed from skiing pants to Capitol Hill in 2017 when he was called to testify before Congress about the effects of climate change on snowsports.
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Anne Nolin, a snow scientist from the University of Nevada who is a member of Protect Our Winter’s science coalition, says that less snow causes global warming. Snow is reflective because it is white. However, if it melts and exposes ground beneath, the darker surface absorbs sunlight.
“In recent decades, snowpacks has been melting earlier and sooner so we have an drier dry year,” she said. This can lead, she added, to severe wildfires like the 2021 Caldor Fire, which decimated the Tahoe Basin. She says that forest fires can exacerbate the situation by destroying the tree canopy, which usually shades the snow, making it melt earlier.
Snow saving
Nolin describes “this big vicious loop” as a negative but she still believes in the future. She says that nature is resilient, and things grow back, and that better management of forests can help preserve snowpack.
She says that if you open up the forest, it can increase the snow accumulation on the ground as it is not being trapped in the canopy. “And if you can keep a healthy forest with a healthy canopy surrounding those openings by springtime, that forest can continue shading snowpack, which may make it last longer.
Jones hopes that policymakers will look for solutions like renewable energy that will reduce greenhouse gasses and limit climate change.
Jones says that a Winter Olympics without snow is a sign of the future, but Jones insists that it has far greater consequences.
“The work that I do is for future generations, so that I can hopefully look back at my grandkids or kids and say, “You know what?” I was given this chance and I did everything I can to get us on a good path.
