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Unreliable winters bring new ideas, from different offerings to lobbying

People in Mt. Holiday in early December 2024, before the slopes open for the season. (Photo: Izzy Ross/IPR News)
People in Mt. Holiday in early December 2024, before the slopes open for the season. (Photo: Izzy Ross/IPR News)

This coverage is made possible in part through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.


Snow business
Part 1: Where the money went, and why
Part 2: Should a lack of snow be considered an economic disaster?
Today: Efforts to 'save winter' in a warming climate

This week, IPR has looked at how some small businesses in northern Michigan rely on snow, and how they’ve been affected by warm winters.

On Tuesday, we heard about loans from a federal relief program that kicks in during droughts and where all that money went in our region.

Yesterday, we explored an effort by lawmakers to expand that program by making low snowfall its own kind of disaster. That would help businesses in the short term.

Today, we hear about longer term solutions to address winter weather that’s increasingly unreliable, including efforts to push against fossil fuels.

IPR’s Tyler Thompson spoke with Claire Keenan-Kurgan and Izzy Ross.

Thompson: Izzy, let’s start with you. At the end of your story yesterday, you told us how Mt. Holiday in Traverse City is expanding what it offers. Why is that?

Ross: That’s right. They don’t want to just depend on cold, snowy winters. They’re leaning into activities in the other three seasons. So they have a beer garden, there’s a sauna in the parking lot.

And it’s not just Mt. Holiday. Brad Garmon is with the state’s outdoor recreation industry office. He says strategies will include developing and promoting things like hiking and mountain biking — things that will require planning.

Garmon (recorded audio): "There are ways that we can monitor and shift that we're just gonna have to be a little bit more nimble about when things shift over from snowmobile to ATVs or something like that, and when we can do it safely and continue to steward the resource well for the long term."

Garmon used Boyne Mountain as an example: they built a wooden suspension bridge – a skybridge — a couple years ago for people to walk across and admire the landscape.

Keenan-Kurgan: Yeah, I actually saw that last weekend!

Ross: Some ski resorts in northern Michigan actually did OK last year, as well — but those were generally bigger places that had the ability to make snow more efficiently, and more money, frankly.

It’s not straightforward — sometimes warming on the Great Lakes can actually make Lake Effect Snow more intense. But the point here is that it’s about everything being harder to predict and potentially more extreme, including years without snow.

Thompson: And it’s not just the Midwest that’s been dealing with unpredictable winters. Claire, you got in touch with some other states outside the Midwest. What were they doing about warming winters?

Keenan-Kurgan: I did. Another region that’s really feeling this type of problem is the Northeast; snowy areas in the mountain West and West Coast are usually at higher altitudes and may be less affected by temperature swings.

Who got what
Check out our interactive map to see where federal loans went last year. 

But when I talked to tourism boards in the Northeast, some employees were pretty surprised about the loan programs available in the Upper Midwest that we reported on earlier this week. They didn’t have access to the programs that businesses in parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had access to after low snowfall.

In Vermont they got access to federal disaster loans after major summer flooding, but not for a lack of snowfall.

One tourism official told me that businesses like ski resorts have just been blowing more snow and investing in snow guns for the slopes.

And in Western New York, they didn’t have financial support for snow-reliant businesses like we saw here in Michigan, either, even though they had some of the same Great Lakes weather patterns.

Thompson: So that leads us to another approach. In your reporting Claire, you’ve seen some groups target fossil fuels on the policy and legislative level.

Keenan-Kurgan: Yes, I got interested in a group called Protect our Winters. They’re a climate lobbying group founded originally by pro-snowboarder Jeremy Jones. And they’re trying to mobilize what they call the snowsports industry to tackle climate change at the legislative level. So they’re lobbying against fossil fuels, basically, on behalf of the snowsports industry, and they go to Congress and lobby for green legislation.

I asked their CEO, Erin Sprague, about the small business loans available in Michigan. She said they support anything that gives a boost to local snow economies, but that it’s a defensive move to clean up problems already here due to climate change, and she says they also like to play offense:

Sprague (recorded audio): "We want to go upstream to, like, what is the source of the problem in all of this? And one of the parts of climate that’s one of the hardest things — like, climate is a very solvable problem. That’s one of the areas that gives me a lot of hope. But one of the hardest things is in order to make progress, we have to shift the way that we as humans operate: how we heat and cool our homes, how we travel, how we consume energy. So POW’s work tends to focus on fossil fuels and limiting fossil fuel use."

Keenan-Kurgan: They lobbied for the Inflation Reduction Act in Washington, which invested in other forms of energy besides fossil fuels. And that, to her, is supporting industries that rely on snow.

Ross: Yeah, and I’ll just add that we’re seeing outdoor recreation groups getting involved in lots of debates around development and energy — that dynamic has actually been going on for a long time — and organizers wanting to, in turn, rally outdoor enthusiasts against development or get them involved in that debate.

One example is the Copperwood Mine in the Upper Peninsula, which is near the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park and the popular North Country Trail. Groups like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers have spoken out against that development. And that’s true elsewhere in the country, too.

Izzy covers climate change for communities in northern Michigan and around the Great Lakes for IPR through a partnership with Grist.org.
Tyler Thompson is the Morning Edition host and reporter at Interlochen Public Radio.