The Bankruptcy of the Ski Industry: How Warm Winters Are Killing Mountain Economies

You would anticipate certain things when you drive through a mountain town in February: crowded parking lots, the sound of snowguns in the distance, lift lines winding past warming huts, and the smell of wet wool inside a base lodge that has been operating at full capacity since before Thanksgiving. Nowadays, you find something quieter more frequently, in more locations than the industry would like to acknowledge. Emptier. lodges with only half of the regular staff. rental stores that still have equipment on the racks. Tan and patchy slopes that should be white, as though the mountain hasn’t fully committed to winter this year.
It’s not a terrible week. The new pattern is that.
Over $5 billion was lost by U.S. ski areas between 2000 and 2019 as a result of shorter seasons, fewer visitors, and the need for resorts to spend a lot of money on artificial snowmaking in order to remain open. That figure is rising. According to some estimates, the industry will lose about $1 billion annually by the 2050s, assuming it can maintain its current state. That assumption might already be out of date. Over half of North America’s ski resorts from the 1970s have already closed. Not rebranded, not sold—gone. And those who are still competing are doing so in the face of a deteriorating forecast.

A particularly depressing data point was provided by this past winter. Every river basin in the Western United States had below-average snowpack by the end of March 2026. The states whose mountain economies rely most heavily on a consistent winter—Colorado, Utah, California, and Oregon—were operating between 15 and 65 percent of average for the season. In the middle of the season, some resorts closed. Some just reduce employee hours, allowing seasonal workers to cover the shortfall in silence. This year was disastrous, according to Auden Schendler, who managed sustainability at Aspen Ski Company for 26 years. The more difficult thing to accept, he continued, is that a warming climate creates bad years that compound one another rather than just one bad year.

Key Facts: The Global Ski Industry and Climate Threat

The resort gates are not the end of the financial harm. An entire microeconomy is anchored by a ski area, and when it falters, so does everything surrounding it. Mammoth Lakes hotels. Park City breakfast spots. Stowe equipment rental businesses run by the same family for three generations. gas stations at the foot of access roads. The town of Bend, Oregon, or the business district that only exists because someone chose to construct a chairlift up a nearby slope forty or fifty years ago. The impact is widespread when a resort closes or a season is shortened. The loss of jobs comes first, followed by storefronts, property values, and the cultural identity of a community that centered its entire civic life around the winter.
The way the industry has reacted is especially ironic. Snowmaking, the most obvious solution, uses a lot of energy and water and becomes less practical just when it’s most needed—when temperatures rise just enough to prevent the snow from setting. Businesses such as Aspen One have directly acknowledged this by investing in clean energy and electrification at their properties, but even they acknowledge that blowing artificial snow with guns is a short-term holding action rather than a strategy. Senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen One, Chris Miller, has been remarkably forthright: climate change, not the resort’s energy bill, is the true issue. According to Schendler, fixing your lighting and purchasing carbon credits while global warming persists is business management rather than sustainability.
Observing this develop over the past few seasons, it’s remarkable how silent the major players have been. When multiple outlets reached out to Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company, the two biggest ski companies in the nation, about their climate advocacy efforts, they declined to be interviewed. In a similar vein, the National Ski Areas Association, which oversees the industry’s voluntary climate tracking program, declined to make a public statement. Approximately 7% of active ski areas in the United States even take part in that tracking program. The political silence is difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to defend for an industry that faces a real existential threat from climate change.
Researchers and resort operators who are willing to be open about it are sketching out a future in which skiing becomes more concentrated at higher elevations, accessible to fewer people, more costly, and reliant on a decreasing window of consistently cold weather. The most vulnerable and least prepared to adapt are lower-altitude family resorts, which introduced generations of middle-class and working-class children to the sport. In an effort to spread the financial risk over a full year rather than just three or four, larger resorts are shifting to year-round tourism, adding mountain biking trails, summer festivals, and ziplines. It’s still genuinely unclear if that works at scale for smaller businesses that can’t afford that kind of reinvention.
Spending time with this story gives me the impression that the ski industry is torn between being aware of what’s going on and not quite being prepared to voice it loudly enough for it to matter. There are still mountains. At least the lifts that can afford to operate are still operational. However, the winters that created all of this—the long season that enabled these communities, the deep early snowpack, and the dependable cold—are becoming shorter and less consistent each year. Additionally, the receipts are beginning to reflect this.