Engineering Winter

Abstract

As winters warm and snowfall becomes less reliable, ski resorts worldwide increasingly depend on artificial snow to stay open. Snowmaking, once a stopgap, has become the backbone of entire seasons in a sprawling choreography of pumps and pressurized mist designed to hold trails together. At resorts like Vermont’s Bromley Mountain, snowmakers work through the night, drawing millions of gallons from limited reservoirs and operating within narrowing windows of cold air. What emerges is a portrait of winter in transition: less predictable, more expensive, increasingly manufactured. The efforts to preserve winter recreation carry growing costs in energy, water, and equitable access. Many smaller, independent ski areas struggle to meet the demands of climate adaptation, while larger resorts expand their operations, widening the divide in who can afford to sustain operations. In the American West, where rivers depend heavily on snowpack melt, the spread of snowmaking ties winter recreation to a water system already under immense strain. As artificial snow becomes the norm, winter is increasingly a season bought, built, and rationed, raising the question of whether attempts to keep the season alive are accelerating the changes that threaten to erase it.