WHERE CLIMATE
MEETS COMMUNITY
Mountain communities are facing climate impacts on multiple fronts, and ski areas are responding with climate strategies that scale outward.
BY KATIE BRINTON, SENIOR EDITOR, SAM
Wasatch Mountains, but that brown dust carried on the wind also causes the snow to absorb more sunlight, melting it faster by a measure of weeks. That’s a problem, as far as Utah ski areas are concerned; less water in the Great Salt Lake equals less snowfall and more snow melt. But this is not a story about powder, or even about preserving winter. It’s a story about how climate impacts show up in ways that have nothing to do with snowfall totals—and how ski areas are responding by expanding the scope of their climate work beyond their boundar- ies, operations, and even industry. SNOWBIRD: CLIMATE CHANGE AS PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS Great Salt Lake looms large in the basin. At 1,700 square miles currently, it is the largest inland body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth larg- est terminal lake in the world. A remnant of the Late Pleistocene era, Great Salt Lake remains a vital part of Utah’s eco-
system and now, its economy. One mil- lion migratory birds depend on it, and it generates more than $2.5 billion in annual economic activity, according to a 2023 Brigham Young University study. On inversion days, dust and pollution from the lake settle over the valley like a lid. On clear days, you can see the water from the Wasatch. A visible concern. Unlike, say, the melting glaciers of Greenland, Great Salt Lake—which hit a record low ele- vation in 2022, shrinking it to just 888 square miles of surface area—is “not out of sight, and definitely not out of mind” for Utahns, says Snowbird sustainabil- ity and water resources director Hilary Arens. It is a visible existential threat.
The Great Salt Lake is shrinking. Snowbird president and general manager Dave Fields, who grew up in the basin, recalls annual elemen- tary school field trips to the lake, where he and his classmates would float on their backs in the vast inland sea and return to the bus itchy with salt-crusted skin. The site of that an- nual pilgrimage is now surface crust. Over the past 40 years, as the lake’s water levels have fallen and its sur- face area has diminished, more than 800 square miles of lakebed has been exposed. That’s more than half the size of Rhode Island. When wind kicks up over those exposed sediments, it carries dust, some of it containing naturally occurring heavy metals and toxins from industrial activity, into the same valley where thousands of people live and rec- reate, up into Little Cottonwood Canyon and onto the slopes of Snowbird. The Great Salt Lake effect dumps enviable amounts of snow into the
This page, top: Snowbird, Utah, with Great Salt Lake in the distance. Credit: Chris Segal. This page, above: Snowbird GM Dave Fields (center right) joins a panel convened for the resort’s ongoing lake-focused education series.
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