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climate change

Copenhagen, and Is it a Hoax?

December 17th, 2009 by snowman

I wonder how many people representing the various sectors of the ski industry are in Copenhagen? Current trends in climate change certainly don’t look good for the ski industry, do they? Yeah, I know, compared to the health insurance industry, or the banking industry, the ski industry is pretty small potatoes, so when its future [...]

Hooray for Aspen

June 10th, 2009 by snowman

I just read a report on Firsttracksonline stating that the Aspen Skiing Company signed on to a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal advocating for “both capping and putting a price for the first time ever on the pollution that causes global warming.”
I applaud ASC, but have to ask, where are Vail Resorts, [...]

The Future of Winter

May 20th, 2009 by snowman

This has been a good news- bad news few days for those of us who love winter. Yesterday, an American President finally stepped up and told the car makers they had to improve gas mileage averages for their car and truck fleets ( meaning-less importing of foreign oil, less pollution, few dollars spent at the [...]

Grand Targhee Wins Golden Eagle Award

May 16th, 2009 by snowman

Congrats to my wonderful local ski hill, Grand Targhee, for winning the 2009 Golden Eagle Award for Overall Environmental Excellence by a ski resort at the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) National Convention and Tradeshow going on in Florida. As I noted last month, Grand Targhee became the “first organization in North America” to have [...]

Unwarming Winter

April 28th, 2009 by snowman

A couple of days ago I posted the latest NASA map showing all the areas on the Earth’s surface that were either warmer than normal or cooler than normal in March 09 and it was a depressing map for skiers to look at with warming areas covering far more of the Earth than cooling areas.
We [...]

Warming Winter Update

April 24th, 2009 by snowman

I finally got around to checking out NASA’s global temperature monitoring data for March of 2009 and sadly March’s temperature map shows a continuation of this winter’s above average temperatures across most the vast majority of the Earth’s land masses. Only Alaska and the Canadian Rockies, out of all the Earth’s ski domains,  got a [...]

Flint Michigan

April 23rd, 2009 by snowman

What might Flint, Michigan have to do with the future of skiing? Maybe a report on the radio yesterday about Flint’s efforts to become a smaller city will prove to be predictive of a not to distant in the future happening in the world of some ski resort communities.
What is Flint trying to do? The [...]

What Are Sunday’s For?

March 20th, 2009 by snowman

Carpooling! At least at Grand Targhee that is. Just a reminder that Grand Targhee is rewarding people skiing there who arrive in a private vehicle carrying three or more people with discounts of $10 off their lift tickets and vouchers for free coffee or hot chocolate.
Now here’s an item that is sure to raise the [...]

February 09, Another Hot Month

March 16th, 2009 by snowman

After last night’s National Weather Service’s prediction of lots of snow turned into rain here in the Tetons, I thought, what the heck, why not get further depressed and look at NASA’s global temperature map for February 2009.
As you can see, only Western Canada and Siberia were below normal while much of the Arctic and [...]

The Worst Four Letter Word

March 3rd, 2009 by snowman

Rain. I hear it drumming LOUDLY on my roof. On March 3rd, we should be getting wonderful light snow. I just checked Targhee’s SNOTEL metering and see that even at 9260′ in the mountains the temperatures have been above freezing for the past 30 hours. SNOTEL also shows a loss of 4.5″ of snow depth [...]