Jim Pearson, executive director of Mt. Holiday in Traverse City, in December 2024. (Photo: Izzy Ross/IPR News)
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
The slopes haven’t opened yet at Mt. Holiday, a small ski hill in Traverse City. They’re still building up the base of snow.
Jim Pearson, the executive director, has been coming to the slope since he was a teenager in the mid-1980s. And he hopes they’ll have a decent season thanks to some cold nights that have made up for slightly warmer days, a big difference from last season — northern Michigan’s hottest winter on record.
“All of it would melt, because it was getting into the 60s, it was 40s at night,” he said. “There’s no way we can compete with that kind of weather.”
With businesses like Mt. Holiday battered by months of warm weather, the federal government declared a drought in over 40 Michigan counties, including in Grand Traverse County, where the ski hill is located.
That allowed Pearson to apply for a federal Economic Injury Disaster Loan through the Small Business Administration (SBA), and Mt. Holiday received $480,000 interest-free for a year. It helped meet the payroll and catch up on bills.
“Even if we’re not making snow that lasts, we still have to make snow,” he said. That made for expensive electricity bills. “You have 10 [snow] guns running all night long for two or three days. That’s a lot of power and a lot of expense.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture determines which areas fall under droughts and are available for assistance. But relying on the drought declarations for loans meant some counties that were harmed by the warmer winter, but didn’t have that designation, didn’t qualify for help.
Now, a group of senators from Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota want to expand the program to include a new category of economic disaster: a lack of snow.
How it would work
The bill, introduced this September in the U.S. Senate, is called the Winter Recreation Small Business Recovery Act. It would make a small tweak to the language of the existing program.
Elected officials have pushed for such steps before; last spring, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called on the federal government to provide more options, saying businesses struggling with warm winters didn’t have a good way to access federal relief.
The idea is to ensure that businesses harmed by winters like the last one are able to get help. Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, one of the bill’s sponsors, was not made available for an interview with IPR. In a news release, he said Michigan had “lost millions of dollars in revenue,” and that ski hills had lost around $41 million and laid off thousands of employees.
“No one had really contemplated the fact that a lack of snow and ice was a different kind of drought,” said Brad Garmon, the executive director of the state’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office within the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
The existing drought declaration doesn’t work for many businesses that rely on snow. And while organizations and governments need long-term strategies to deal with a changing climate, Garmon said expanding the loan program would help make distribution of these funds more equitable.
The program “was so unevenly accessible and we had businesses that could need it but couldn’t get it,” he said. “So this is a fix to one particular tool. It’s not the fix, necessarily, for everything that we’re facing.”
An uncertain future
Climate trends are pointing to warmer winters for places like northern Michigan.
Steven Dundas, an environmental economist and associate professor at Oregon State University who studies the intersection of economy and climate, agreed that this kind of loan program helps in the short term, but said that with “most climate models predicting reduced snowpack moving forward, this, to me, seems like a short-run fix for a long-run problem.”
Estimating how climate change could reshape the recreation economy is difficult, Dundas said; the range of factors and potential outcomes makes it hard to draw neat conclusions. For instance, warmer springs and falls could allow for certain outdoor activities to rise in some areas.
Still, the effects of unpredictable winters and low snow can be devastating. Dundas pointed to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management that gathered national data from short-term rentals like AirBnBs near ski resorts and correlated it to snowpack.
“They suggest ski areas could see visitation drops around 60% with billions of dollars in annual damages,” he said, with the authors predicting declines of 40 – 60% by the end of the century. Much of that is concentrated in Utah and California, but while the results varied widely by state, the study found places like Michigan could lose tens of millions of dollars in revenue from recreation each year.
Dundas said expanding the SBA loan program would help prepare for unusual weather rather than long-term shifts in the climate.
“The proposed bill is perfect for a weather shock,” he said. “But if we anticipate that that weather shock is going to become more common as climate changes, that requires kind of a little bit more out of the box thinking about policies that can help incentivize adaptation and resilience in these communities, rather than a boom-and-bust climate cycle with snowpack.”
Some left behind, this time
For many who depend on winter weather for their livelihood, even a small fix can make a big difference.
The Senate bill is trying to reach people like Dax Richer, one of the new owners of Ruth Lake Resort, in the Upper Peninsula’s Baraga County. That county was not under a drought declaration, even though they didn’t get enough snow to bring in many visitors, so his resort was not eligible for those federal loans.
“We had absolutely no one stay at the resort during the winter months during our first year of owning it,” he said. Richer and his husband were expecting to make around $125,000 this year. They made less than half that, around $47,000. “We’re completely confused why our county, in the middle of all these other counties that received support, was singled out to not receive it.”
And while summers are still busy, if tourism doesn’t work out, he said, they might turn the resort into long-term housing.
Back at Mt. Holiday, the fragrance of burning wood drifts from a sauna trailer whose owner rents space in the parking lot, just one of the changes they’ve made in recent years.
“We want people to be out here, hiking, biking. I want to do concerts, running events,” he said. “We’re in partnership with East Bay Township to expand those trails. Hopefully that’ll start this summer.”
They’re looking at a new norm, Pearson said, so they’re hedging their bets.
IPR’s Claire Keenan-Kurgan contributed to this report.