Each year seems to bring a new record for warmest and least snowy winter. The lack of snow could represent a drought or a warm shift that turns heavy precipitation into rain instead of something we can groom and use.
Weather patterns vary across the country, meaning that some areas are buried in snow, while others forget what it looks like. Often, the area that gets left out is northern New England, because of how the storm centers track up the St. Lawrence Valley and pull warm air in from the Atlantic. But even within that relatively small area, a storm might dump on the western part and skip the eastern, or hit the coast and leave all inland areas with nothing. And northernmost Maine might get some of that St. Lawrence Valley bounty, while the more accessible recreation areas to the south have to find some hopeful way to talk about the fact they they didn't.
If we don't get the big earning periods, it's hard to keep going. Christmas Week is always questionable south of the White Mountains, so we set our sights on Martin Luther King Weekend. That looks like a washout this year, so we're squinting between our fingers at February, with its school vacation weeks. The only one that matters is Massachusetts, because Massachusetts people come up here, while New Hampshire vacationers go south. Since I got into the cross-country ski business in 1989, Massachusetts vacation week has been a bust several times. As the winter weakens overall, that late in February is too close to March.
March used to be a winter month. The spring equinox is on the 20th, putting the first two-thirds of the month into winter. But that's the astronomical start of spring. Meteorologists consider March to be a spring month. As much as we used to laugh at the beginning of spring as we looked at the stubborn accumulation of winter hanging on into April, and late storms sometimes bringing feet of snow in March, its allegiance to the warmer half of the year is becoming obvious. What late snow we might get is dense, sticky, ungroomable cement.
If the entire world suddenly threw itself into climate change mitigation right now, the cross-country ski business still would probably die out. We can't live from polar vortex to polar vortex with multiple years of nearly nothing in between. The few cross-country areas that make snow are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a kilometer or two. Your sprawling trail network means nothing if nature does not provide. If we have to make it ourselves, skiers will be churning around on what's basically a big skating rink. And snowmaking depends on cold enough weather to produce a large amount of snow in a short time, to distribute over the course.
In a bad winter, timing matters. We've had winters that offered a couple of days skiing followed by several days with unusable conditions. If your available time happened to match our available skiing, you could rack up a decent record before we had to give up on it in early March. With manufactured snow, an area might be able to till up a skiable surface well into the month, depending on how quickly the weather warmed, and whether the course was exposed to a lot of direct sun.
We've learned the hard way that no depth of natural snow is guaranteed to stand up to whatever the climate throws at it next. In 2020, 37 inches of snow from one epic storm in mid December disappeared about ten days later, during a couple of days of warmth and rain. It was not replaced.
The death of winter is bad for the economy and the natural world. Cross-country skiing is only a minor casualty, although it is still a loss. We will continue to try to get something out of every winter as it comes to us, including this one if it shifts to more helpful conditions.
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