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In much of Oregon, this December felt more like October: warm and soggy, with hardly a snowflake in sight. The unseasonably warm conditions spell trouble for one industry in particular: ski resorts.
Mt. Hood Meadows is transporting snow from one hill to another. Mount Ashland operators are contemplating furloughs and layoffs. Willamette Pass Resort manufactures snow with a machine, only for rain to wash it off the slopes.
The widespread distress is the result of a Cascade snowpack that sits at 24% of its average. The Salem Statesman Journal reported last week that only the state’s three largest, highest-priced ski resorts are open. A review of ski conditions shows even those areas are only half-operational. Just seven of 12 lifts were open at Mt. Hood Meadows on Saturday, and none of Timberline’s 41 trails were open.
As with most calamities in Oregon, this one has attracted the attention of The New York Times, which profiled the bleak ski season in a Thursday story, and warned that it could presage something worse: a dry landscape vulnerable to super-sized wildfires. (A low snowpack, even in a wet winter, means the landscape dries out faster in the summer because there’s no snowmelt.)
The past year was the hottest ever recorded, a signal that Oregon winters without snow could become another unwelcome feature of a warming planet. But Rebecca Muessle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Portland, says that another factor is to blame for current conditions: El Niño.
“We’ve still had quite a bit of precipitation,” Muessle tells WW. “But it’s been in the form of rain, not snow. And that’s because it’s warmer—which is a fairly typical process with an El Niño-type year. This year, in and of itself, cannot be directly tied to climate change, but rather is a symptom of this El Niño [event].”
Still, Muessle cautions not to expect any chill in the coming weeks.
“The seasonal temperature outlook is showing a 50-50 chance of being above normal” in early January, she says. “For right now, for at least the next week, we’re not looking at a significant snowfall.”