My Favorite Hobby Comes With a Side of Climate Dread
Recently, I bought a portable lantern in case the power goes out.
Then, I texted one of my family members, who has a reputation for preparedness, to see if they had any ideas beyond the obvious. “Life insurance and a Bible,” they shot back, reminding me that alongside their planning streak, they will, in almost any context, mine for a wisecrack. I tried to keep up, wondering whether you were supposed to eat the life insurance or the Bible.
The idea struck me after California recently announced a preemptive state of emergency in response to the supercharged El Niño. I’m not a fan of alarmism, and I don’t expect a 200-foot-tall tsunami to wash away the city where I live. But after combing through what El Niño might mean for California this year—more rain, floods—I figured it couldn’t hurt to think ahead. The Big One’s coming, too, after all.
That’s one side of my relationship with the climate. It involves awe and worry, and it boils down to a few questions. Do I need to do anything to stay safe? More importantly, are we, as a state, country, and world, doing enough to mitigate the potential impacts? How bad could it get, really?
I’m also a skier, though. In years past, El Niño and its sibling, La Niña, have felt, to me, far less tense, with exciting pre-season forecasts and hopeful debates about where and when the most snow would arrive.
Largely ignorant of how the cycle could influence weather outside the mountains, I hoovered up winter outlooks. These were transmissions from the future that carried stoke or despair, but the despair wasn’t real despair. Either way, I was still going skiing. Like fall ski movies, the Farmers’ Almanac, and buying gear I didn’t need, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation was as joyous as it was jargon-laden. Puzzling it out was my astrology.
The thing is, it now feels increasingly difficult to keep those two identities—powder freak and concerned onlooker—separate because the messy real world and the place we flee to keep smashing together. This winter, I’m not only hoping the Sierra gets slammed with snow. I’m also concerned about flooding.
El Niño is just one instance of that duality. As the world warms, the past year delivered warning after warning that skiing isn’t a hermetically sealed winter wonderland. Not that it wasn’t obvious already.
A meager snowpack out West torpedoed powder dreams and cut into ski resorts’ bottom lines. Around a month ago, St. Mary’s Glacier, the iconic perennial snowfield outside Denver, disappeared for the first time in at least a century. Wildfires burned a record number of acres in Oregon, and the state’s iconic summer ski haunt, Timberline Lodge, only made it until July.
The 2025-26 ski season was an outlier and the resort industry, with its fleets of snow guns and burgeoning snow storage techniques, is tough. Still, researchers recently found that human-caused climate change made the West’s severe snow drought four times more likely. Adrienne Marshall, the lead author, noted in a release that the event offered a “tangible example” of what the future would look like if emissions keep rising, with the encouraging caveat that these outcomes are not inevitable. “Lower emissions would reduce the risk,” she said.
And there’s the rub, basically. The last beer I drank on Friday did not start lecturing me about melting icebergs after a few sips. Nor did my Xbox, an evening walk, or the kickball league I joined, which I appreciated—the news cycle has me covered, please and thank you. But the weather hasn’t been so compliant over the last 12 months. If your favorite spot was in one of the states that got blanked last winter, it was almost impossible not to wonder where the hell all the dirt came from. Mountain escapism is now tied to one of the reasons we might choose escapism in the first place. Doesn’t that defeat the point?
Maybe not. Even with its curative powers, skiing was never so one-dimensional. Venturing into the mountains often means bumping into sensations beyond bliss. Still, we choose to go and, in some cases, seek out what challenges us and forces us into the moment. Atop a chute, I’ve felt anxiety, dread, and, after tumbling head over heels, red-hot embarrassment. Other times, I’ve found a deep sense of accomplishment when I did what I thought I couldn’t, facing a drop or zipping through a couloir. These excursions happened during my leisure time, but required direct contact with reality.
There are other things to absorb out there, of course, and not all of them involve scaring your pants off. I mean the tactile, arresting sensation of dipping into a simple carve, and feeling the grip, the bounce, and the inertia that sweeps from toe to head; the buddy who emerges from the lodge bathroom and provides the most awful and hilarious description of what they encountered there; the wind rustling through pine needles, carrying alpine smells and now-thawing memories.
That’s what separates skiing from so many other ways to unwind. It encourages being present with friends, taking on spooky lines and sitting with difficult emotions, and, yes, noticing the environment around us, even when it’s ugly.
I don’t, then, only see the connection between the mountains I love and a warming atmosphere as a sick, cosmic prank.
Skiing can and should be a salve when it needs to be. But in a time when it’s easier than ever to slip into apathy—to doom scroll until every crisis loses meaning—skiing offers another gift that, depending on the season, doesn’t always look like one. It simply asks that we keep paying attention.
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