With Whistler struggling for snow, is it time for skiers to look further inland?
Whistler Blackcomb is one of the world’s great ski resorts – a place that’s likely to feature on most skiers’ and snowboarders’ bucket lists. Situated 120km north of Vancouver, it offers snowsports on a truly epic scale, its total skiable area of 8,171 acres making it the largest resort in North America by some distance.
With its two titular mountains linked by the vertiginous Peak to Peak gondola, it has everything from steeps to glades to gently meandering pistes, and it also boasts an enviable snow record, with an average of 10.8m of the white stuff falling every year. So far this winter, however, things have not been looking too rosy in the snow department. On Christmas Day 2022, Whistler village was reporting 40cm of snow on the ground; on 25 December 2023, by contrast, the sidewalks remained stubbornly snow-free. A few days into January, the base station webcams still showed mostly grass and mud on the lower slopes. Just after the turn of the year, due to lack of snow, only 149 of 275 trails were open, and just 54 per cent of terrain. A notice on the resort website warned “Early Season Conditions: Stay on Groomed Runs – Unmarked Rocks and Obstacles.” Beginners were being advised to only ski the Whistler half of the resort, while any experts hoping to ride legendary double-black diamond terrain accessed via Spanky’s Ladder or in the Symphony Amphitheatre would be disappointed: both areas remained closed.
It isn’t just Whistler that’s been suffering – an unseasonably mild winter has been hammering other ski resorts in British Columbia too. The three small, relatively low-lying ski hills just to the north of Vancouver – Grouse Mountain, Cypress Mountain and Mount Seymour – have been particularly badly hit. As 2023 drew to a close, Grouse and Cypress only had two runs open apiece, while
Mount Seymour had to suspend snowsports altogether while it waited for more snow.
As a pupil at Quilchena Elementary School in the south Vancouver suburb of Richmond in the late 1980s and early 90s, I remember looking across the city after heavy winter rainfall to see how far down the North Vancouver mountains the snowline had descended. It rarely snowed in the city, but rain down at sea level in the colder months almost always seemed to mean a dusting of snow up on the hills. Three decades later, though, with climate change starting to bite, how much longer will Vancouver’s three local ski resorts remain viable?
According to Lisa Erven, a meteorologist at Environment Canada, Vancouver has just experienced its third-warmest December on record, with temperatures “about two to three degrees above normal.” For coastal resorts like Whistler, Grouse, Cypress and Seymour, where even in a typical winter temperatures don’t tend to drop all that far below freezing, those two or three degrees can evidently make a big difference; further inland, however, the picture is a little different.
Drive about 460km north-east from Vancouver and you’ll arrive at a relatively down-home ski resort called Silver Star, just up the road from the city of Vernon. It’s at roughly the same latitude as Whistler, but, being a lot further from the sea, the winter temperatures here tend to be lower. In January, Whistler village sees average highs of -2C and lows of -8C, whereas in Silver Star the average daily range is between -4C and -12C. I learned to ski here in 1990, and although my memories of that first Easter trip are mostly warm and sunny, I’ve been back in midwinter and snowboarded in -20C – conditions in which facemasks are pretty much mandatory if you don’t want to risk frostbite.
Silver Star won’t be immune to the effects of climate change any more than Whistler will, but a look at conditions there during the recent warm period suggests that it might be better placed, at least in the shortterm. While both have snow depth of approximately one metre at their highest elevations at time of writing, Silver Star has half a metre at its base, whereas Whistler has nothing. At Silver Star, all ten lifts are running, and 113 out of 132 trails are open. Whistler’s snow report describes snow conditions as “spring” (read: “wet and heavy”) while at Silver Star on-piste conditions are said to be “packed powder”.
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the changes our climate is currently undergoing won’t happen in a neat, linear way – although the general trend is for things to get warmer, there will be some unpredictable swings. What’s happening in BC right now, however, may well offer a glimpse into the near-future: a higher average snowline at Whistler, only limited skiing in North Vancouver, and more snow-sure conditions further inland. Whistler isn’t going to disappear from skiers’ bucket lists any time soon, but anyone planning a ski trip to BC in the future would do well to look at other, less famous alternatives.
The base station webcams still show mostly grass and mud on the lower slopes