Après ski Resorts shut down or adapt as snow retreats

Sitting at his window in Västerås, central Sweden, Thomas Ohlander is wondering when the winter season might start for his outdoor adventure business, Do the North. “To schedule a trip we have to be sure of snow,” he says, “And that start date is going backwards at a crazy speed.” Ohlander's local ice-skating club has recorded the first date on which they managed to get out on the frozen lakes each year. In 1988 that date was 4 November; this year the prediction is 4 December.

- Kevin Rushby

All over Europe alarm bells are ringing over the state of winter snow sports and fears for the future. In France the ski resorts of Alpe du Grand Serre and Grand Puy have announced they will not open this winter, adding to a growing tally: 180 since the 1970s, according to the geographer Pierre-Alexandre Métral of Grenoble University.

Alpe du Grand Serre's closure was blamed on a lack of funds to become a year-round destination as the snow season shrinks, while Grand Puy's is owing to a lack of regular snowfall leading to a drop in visitors and an annual loss of hundreds of thousands of euros, according to the local town hall.

The pattern of decline is now well established: as snowlines and glaciers retreat, lower-level resorts are forced to make difficult economic decisions and many call it a day. In the Sierra de Guadarrama, Spain, the bulldozers have moved in on the Club Alpino, which opened in the late 1940s and is now regularly snow-free.

The situation is repeated worldwide: a recent study estimated that of the 21 locations that have hosted the Winter Olympics, only one could manage it by the end of the century (Sapporo in Japan). In 2022, Beijing was completely run on artificial snow. The assessment of Johan Eliasch, the president of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS), is that the ski industry is facing an existential crisis.