Snow Drought

If you look closely, you can see the completely bare patch of trail we had to come over.

In grade school, snow could be called down from the heavens simply by flipping one’s pajamas inside out and backward. That was the lore at least. If you wanted a snow day and snow was in the forecast, it was your best shot at canceling school or at least landing a two-hour delay.

Sometimes I’d flip my pink striped pajamas around on a particularly chilly night, no snow in the forecast, just to try and summon the weather — always disappointed waking to a bone-dry morning, feeling I must not entirely understand the magic. 

In those days (I am 30 now, making me legally permitted to say “in those days”), the only way to know if school had been canceled or delayed was to put on KDKA news and watch the lower thirds as they cycled through names of schools in the area that had been closed. They ran in alphabetical order and so help you god if you looked away for a moment and missed your school, you’d have to sit through another 10 minutes while they cycled through all the other schools again. Then of course, there was always the risk of a commercial break just as they were about to get to the Bs (for Butler County) and you’d have to sit through them all again only to find out, god dammit, school was in fact not canceled and the bus was coming in 15 minutes and you’re still dressed in backward pajamas with messy, unwashed hair.

I loved a good school cancellation, but I know what I really loved was the snow itself — how a seemingly static landscape could suddenly become pliable, how adults in their anxious hurry were forced to pause.

Because my mom was a teacher (still is actually, god bless her), but not at my school district, there was always a chance our school cancellations wouldn’t line up and I remember several days, at least, trudging across the neighborhood in the snow to my grandma’s house so my brother and I would have adult supervision during our snow day while my mom drove an hour south to North Allegheny school district where she was paid better (but still pretty close to poverty wages). 

I know that commute nearly killed her (literally on those icy roads, but also emotionally) and while I don’t seem to recall this happening, there must have been at least a few days when my brother and I glumly marched off to the bus stop while my mom reveled in one of her very few blissful days home alone thanks to her own school cancellation. 

Which is to say it seemed, most years, like there was plenty of snow to go around.

Even during undergrad in Pittsburgh, we had a few days of classes canceled for bad snow storms and I remember thinking I’d won the lottery when I found a pair of $40 North Face snow boots at the REI garage sale (back when it was actually garage sale prices) and could finally get to and from classes and my job without completely soaking through my thin, fabric Payless ShoeSource boots in the heavy, wet Pittsburgh snow.

But all of that is changing. In 2023, Pittsburgh received its second-lowest snowfall ever recorded at just 13.1 inches for the season. The year before that they had the lowest seasonal snowfall in 30 years at just 17.6 inches. And while anomalies are going to happen in the years that follow, that trend of no-snow is only expected to continue. 

I’m worried my mom’s students — those Pennsylvania kids — are going to grow up never quite knowing the thrill or ecstatic chaos of a snowy winter. Do they even bother turning their pajamas inside out and backward anymore, or has it lost all of its meaning? 

When I moved to Colorado in 2015 to attend grad school at CU Boulder, I made one promise to myself now that I’d finally managed to get myself West: Come hell or high water, I would learn to ski.

And learn to ski I did — in the backcountry no less — with subpar gear that emptied my bank account, a lot of tears and hopefully equally as many shit-eating grins (maybe not that first year though). 

If I thought snow was magical in Pennsylvania, it took on a whole other meaning in Colorado, especially with skiing. Gone were the days of eagerly waiting for 3-4 inches of snow, I was instead watching the forecast waiting for 6-8 inches down in Boulder and hopefully 10-15 up in the mountains. That was a good snow day. And my first year in town, it seemed to happen several times a month, all winter long. 

While Boulder snow came and went (our 300 oppressively sunny days a year can melt a blizzard covered city down to a puddle in one cloud-free afternoon), I knew as soon as I climbed another thousand or so feet up into the mountains, there would be guaranteed snow, every single time. If I wanted to romp around in a snow field for a day, all I had to do was head 40 minutes West any time between November and March, and there it was. 

2015 - 2016 was even an El Niño year, but overall Colorado ended up with a pretty average snowpack. I couldn’t believe this kind of consistent, predictable snow was an utterly normal occurrence and bound to be even better in non El Niño years. I was hooked.

Not exactly fluffy Colorado powder

Driving up Caribou Road outside of Nederland last Saturday, conditions looked unskiable. Even up over 9,000 feet, entire mountainsides were bare. Where there was snow, rocks, grass, and gravel poked through. The exposed earth was drier than panko breadcrumbs and crunched under the tires like it too. 

Phebe and I had driven up to Eldora to pick up our uphill ski passes for the season and figured we’d snag a quick backcountry tour while we were in the area. By the grace of god, all 10 lifts at Eldora were open (not that we’d be using them), but still nearly a third of the runs were closed due to lack of snow. In the parking lot, I watched kids careen down the bunny slope while the wind whipped so hard you could see it ripping the human-made snow right off the face of the mountain. We zipped our faces into our hoods, quickly snagged our uphill passes, and headed back the way we’d come, around the mountain toward Caribou Ranch Open Space.

Halfway up the dirt road, my spirits sank even further. The thin veneer of snow that had been up there just two weeks prior was nearly gone, melted, or blown right off.

“We might be able to go for a hike up there today, but there’s no way we’re doing any skiing,” I said to Phebe. I felt ridiculous dressed in my thick snow pants, rescue beacon wrapped snugly around my chest, and almost no snow to be seen.

Super sick tree skiing

It’s been a rough snow year nationwide, but especially so for the West. Scientists are calling it a “snow drought,” though they keep reminding the media it’s a little too early to panic. Typical snowpack peak for Colorado is still about 90 days away. 

Still, most regions in the state are only at about 60-70 percent normal snowpack for this time of year which means we’ve only got a couple of months to close the gap — and so far, it’s not looking good. The problem out here is that most of our water comes from snow. In fact, two-thirds of the water in the Colorado River starts as snow — and that river supports more than 40 million people across seven states and parts of Mexico. Add onto that the increased wildfire risk now looming this summer and you can see how even with 90 days to go, every check of the weather app can spike the ‘ole anxiety meter just a bit. 

One explanation for these conditions is that it’s another El Niño year, but that can mean just about anything for Colorado (as shown by the totally opposite weather Colorado received in 2015). We sit right on the border of El Niño’s warm, dry air up north and the cool, wet weather further south meaning the slightest variation in the atmosphere could bring anything from snow drought conditions to the wettest year on record. So far, we seem to be falling into the former. 

If this were just a once-in-a-while atmospheric occurrence I’d likely be able to brush it off as a rough year, clean off the mountain bike for some winter riding, and start saving up for a half-decent air purifier when the wildfire smoke inevitably arrived — knowing we’d get precipitation the following winter. 

But Colorado’s been in a drought for the last 20 years and it’s almost certainly because of human-caused climate change — an issue, I’m sorry to say, we have made almost no progress on worldwide. We’ve already lost 20 percent of our snowpack since the 1950s and are on track to lose another 50 percent by 2100 if nothing is done about greenhouse gas emissions. 

This isn’t just some bleak, gut feeling because of a low snow year, either. The fifth National Climate Assessment dropped last fall and predicted that snow totals in Colorado would decrease 24 percent by 2050. Another study found that by 2050, the ski season would be cut in half. Our extreme elevation will help us hold out longer than others (have you seen how bad it is in the Pacific Northwest this year?), but even then, persistent snow loss (which is defined as half a mountain basin experiencing low-to-no snow for 10 consecutive years at a time) is expected to begin in upper Colorado by the late 2070s. So my hopes are about as thin as the current snowpack.

And yet…

When Phebe and I arrived at the top of Caribou Road, the parking lot was nearly full. A few folks were coming off the trail, skis and poles in hand, which likely meant they’d had to hike out. I ran down to them before unloading.

“Anything worth skiing back there?” I asked.

“So good we did two runs,” one of the women said. I cocked my head, unsure if she was being sarcastic, but they all seemed in good spirits.

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll put on our skis.”

The initial strip of trail down the 4x4 road was so windblown, great big sections were scoured down to bare rock and earth. We had to clip out of our skis, waddle across the raw patches of dirt, run ahead to see if the snow filled the trail back in, then slip our skis back on. But by the time we got around the exposed ledge, back into the trees, the snow softened, the air stilled, and the track was well covered.

“We might actually get some skiing in today,” I said to Phebe, looking up the trail through the powder-lined trees. We ambled up the skin track, taking our time, still expecting the run to be so wind-crusted as to not be worth skiing. But when we got to the old mining hut and looked up at the face of the mountain, the snow looked decent, just carved out. We climbed up to the top of the mountain.

It seemed impossible and yet there we were, getting ready to shoot down some of Colorado’s thinnest snowpack in years, skis sinking several inches into soft snow, smiles on our faces. 

At the bottom of the run, I wished for more daylight, knowing a second lap would put us at risk of skinning out in the dark. But we’d gotten a few turns in and found snow where there should not have been snow, and so we gladly pushed back toward the car.

Since getting back into the Western Interior, I’ve felt a stubbornness welling up in me. Even though the cost of housing is astronomical, even though the wildfire seasons can wreak months and months of havoc across the West, this is home and I don’t want to leave it again. But we’re also on the front lines of climate change as well as impending water wars and a long history of inaction and failure to act at the political level leaves me feeling pretty certain states and the Fed will wait until there’s an actual crisis before finding solutions. And by then it will likely be too late. 

I want to believe that strange stash of powder was some kind of omen of winters to come. Or maybe an indication that there’s more snow in Colorado than scientists think. But I know it was a fluke — an oddly protected patch of snow we just happened to stumble into.

When I stepped out of the steaming hot shower after skiing a little later that night and looked at the neatly folded pajamas sitting next to the sink, I considered, just for a moment, flipping them inside out — a last-ditch effort to call down the snow.