Warm weather has upended winter recreation across North America and Europe this year, cancelling a 400-km dog sled race in Maine, opening golf courses in Ontario, and requiring snow saved from the previous year to run a ski race in Austria. A warm, dry El Niño weather pattern coupled with global warming is to blame, scientists say, and has put the threat to winter on centre stage.

Across Canada, many of the ski resorts that are open have been working to cover up green patches and make their terrain skiable enough to entice their usual holiday visitors.

Among them is Mont Tremblant in Quebec. The province has one of the earliest spring breaks in Canada, with many students on holiday this week.

Jean-Francois Gour, communications director for Station Mont Tremblant, said conditions have been variable at the resort all year. This, he said, is illustrated by the fact that temperatures reached 9 C one day last week before falling to -14 C the next day.

“We’ve been through a real cocktail of winter weather,” he said in an interview.

Gour said there had been a dip in hotel and lift tickets bookings, though he could not provide exact numbers.

The resort, he said, is still hoping for an increase in last-minute reservations in March, when the resort typically sees an influx of visitors. He said it is working hard to ensure as many runs as possible remain open for skiers.

“Snow coverage is pretty good,” he said, noting the mountain has been able to use snow-making machines to produce the same amount of snow as it had in previous seasons.

Tremblant will have all its lifts running and is aiming to have up to 80% of its terrain open for spring break skiers, Gour added.

“We’ll be seeing if the weather is really warmer than average and we will try to prioritize the main trails on the mountain to make sure that we can keep all lifts open in the next few weeks.”

Daniel Scott, a professor at the University of Waterloo who studies climate change and tourism, said it has been one of the “weirdest” ski seasons in recent history across the country.

“For ski areas to struggle to provide skiable conditions for March break hasn’t happened very often,” he Scott.

Resorts, specifically in Quebec and Ontario, would sometimes struggle to open for Christmas, but they typically would be able to make snow in January and February to be skiable through March, he said.

When one mountainous region is experiencing poor ski conditions, usually others would fare better, he added. That has not been the case this year.

“It’s been a strange winter, coast to coast across North America, US and Canada,” Scott said. “This has been an anomaly that I don’t recall seeing, certainly in the last 20 years of studying the ski industry.”

He said this is illustrated by the fact his local Ontario ski hills Chicoppe and Glen Eden remained closed last week despite dropping temperatures, after thunderstorms and high temperatures thwarted their ability to make enough snow.

Meanwhile, GolfNorth Properties advertised that its nearby courses would be opening on the weekend as temperatures exceeded 15 C.

“That has never happened before,” Scott said. “It might be a bit of a PR stunt, but nonetheless, the fact they can open and will probably be open for March break and kids could be golfing instead of skiing ­– that’s not winter, (how) most people remember them.”

Across the country in Whistler, BC, skiers have been enjoying 110 cm. of fresh powder.

The snowfall was a big improvement in the dirt-covered runs skiers have dealt with on the lower levels of the resort this season.

Dane Gergovich, a spokesman for Whistler-Blackcomb, said the resort was grateful it came ahead of the March break, a “peak period” for the resort.

“We do see a lot of families and destination travellers, so we expect that to remain the same, especially with these favourable weather events that we’ve been getting. Our hope (is) that we’ll see increased numbers as we have historically,” he said.

He added, “Mother Nature has certainly presented us with challenges this season. To date, even with all the snow, we’re still behind in terrain offerings compared to a typical season. But we have extended it given the challenges we’ve had so that we can work fast to gain back much of the terrain that we lost due to the unseasonable temperatures and rain events.”

Historical model

In the US, a new study says a dry El Niño weather pattern coupled with global warming is to blame for this winter’s unpredictable winter and its effects on the sky industry.

“It’s a now problem, not a future-looking problem,” said Auden Schendler, Sr. VP of sustainability at Aspen One, a ski and hospitality company that helped fund the study, published in Current Issues in Tourism.

It models what average ski seasons would have looked like from 2000 to 2019 in the four major US markets — the Northeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific West – without climate change. Its baseline comparison is ski seasons from 1960 to 1979 – a period when most ski areas were operating and before significant trends of human-caused warming began. It found the average modeled season between 2000 and 2019 was shorter by 5.5 to 7.1 days, even with snowmaking to make up for less natural snow.

Under an optimistic emissions reduction scenario, the future of the US ski industry would see seasons shortened by 14 to 33 days in the 2050s, even with snowmaking. A high-emissions scenario would nearly double the days lost.

US ski areas lost $5 billion from 2000 to 2019 as a result of human-caused climate change and could lose around $1 billion annually in the 2050s depending on how much emissions are reduced, a new study found.

People “may not care about the loss of the species halfway around the world, or a flood that’s happening in some other part of the world. But sport is often something people care about,” said Scott, who co-authored the study. “And they can see some of these changes happening.”

“The future of the ski industry, if that’s something you care about, is really in our hands and it will play out over the next 10 to 15 years in terms of the policies and actions that we take to reduce emissions,” Scott said.

Julienne Stroeve, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who wasn’t involved in the work, said the study doesn’t address how skiers and snowboarders might respond to declining quality of the snow that does fall. She wondered whether skier behaviour will change if poor snow conditions become more frequent.

That change in skier behaviour is known as substitutability, Scott said. If skiing isn’t an option or doesn’t provide good snow conditions, will people travel to another ski area? Turn to mountain biking? Scott said he would like to find out.

“That’s another one of those things we’d love to know more about, because then you could improve the modeling,” he said.