Warm Winters Are Shutting Down Alpine Ski Areas In Europe

A French ski area closed and abandoned because winters
no longer provide enough snow to make many
ski resorts viable. Photo by Thomas
Valentin/Guardian 

Europe just got over what has become in recent years a rare blast of winter weather. 

It's only been a week and a half of chilly, snowy weather, and who knows what the rest of the winter will be like over there.  

Cold, snowy spells in Europe's ski areas are getting more and more unreliable, this month notwithstanding. 

The warmer, climate changed world means that the European ski industry in suffering. And in many cases, disappearing. 

As the Guardian tells us: 

"In France, there are today 113 ski lifts totaling nearly 40 miles in length that have been abandoned, nearly three-quarters of them in protected areas. It is not just ski infrastructure. The Mountain Wilderness association estimates that there are more than 3,000 abandoned structures dotted around French mountains, slowly degrading Europe's richest wild terrain. This includes military, industrial and forestry waste, such as old cables, bits of barbed wire, fencing and old machinery."

Some closed resorts look like they were hit by a neutron bomb. Everything is still the way it was left last year, or a few years ago, but all the people are gone 

The Céüze 2000 ski resort in the southern French Alps closed for the season at the end of the winter, 2018. Pretty much everyone assumed it would open the following winter. 

But it didn't. Six years after that 2018 spring closing, a yellowed newspaper dated March 8, 2018 remains on a table next a half-empty body of water. A staff scheduled remained pinned on a wall.

The resort needed at least three months per year of decent skiing to at least break even.  That had pretty much stopped happening. 

The resort had been open for 85 years. But it is now one of many ghost ski areas in the French Alps and elsewhere. The Guardian reported that 186 French ski resorts have closed since winter snows began getting unreliable in the 1990s. By the 2010s, a few winter nights were as warm as summer nights should be. 

France now has 113 ski lifts totaling almost 40 miles that have been abandoned. 

One major problem with the shuttered ski areas is pollution. Equipment rusts and that rust runs into the ground. Insulation and other material from deteriorating buildings scatters around the landscape.

The Guardian says in France, the law requires ski lifts to be removed if they are no longer in use, but the law applies to ski lifts built after 2017.

However, many of the older defunct ski areas in France might be left to rot into the ground. 

The problem isn't limited to Europe. As CBC tell us, more than half of the ski resorts in North America have disappeared since the 1970s. There's a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is climate change that have made winters in many areas less reliable. 

In the United States, the average ski season between 2000 and 2019 shortened by five to seven days, according to Earth.org. Those numbers could double or triple by 2050. 

Here in Vermont, skiing is hugely important to the state's economy. Last year was good after a rough start. This year so far has been quite good, too. But in general, winters are getting warmer, which melts the snow almost as fast as it can fall.

At least as measured in Burlington, seven of the top ten warmest winters have occurred since 2001, and the top four since 2016. Vermont ski areas have invested heavily in snow making to recover more quickly from the warm spells. 

Will that be enough, or will Vermont and other Northeast ski areas go the way of the French Alps?

Not immediately, for sure. But eventually, the ever-rising global temperatures don't really bode well for the future of skiing in many places around the world.