A racer in the 2025 version of the Tour of Anchorage ascends a hill during the race on March 2. The event normally features race distances of 50, 40 and 25 kilometers running through Alaska’s largest city. But this year, because of lack of snow, the events were staged as repeated laps on a 4.4-kilometer loop of manmade snow. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
Unusually warm conditions, connected to long-term climate change, are taking a toll on traditional winter sports in much of Alaska.
What is normally 60 kilometers of snowy trails at Kincaid Park, one of the nation’s top cross-country skiing venues, is now a ribbon of about 5 kilometers, compacted into a platform snaking though expanses of bare ground. The annual Tour of Anchorage, a ski race that normally takes competitors 50 kilometers through Alaska’s largest city, was compressed on Sunday to repeated laps on that manmade loop.
The famed Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, for the fourth time in its history, started timed competition on Monday in Fairbanks, a nearly 300-mile drive north of the usual start at Willow Lake in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. Saturday’s traditional ceremonial start, an untimed and festive jaunt that normally takes dog teams 11 miles through streets and trails in Anchorage, was shortened to about 2 miles of old, slushy and dirty snow.
Anchorage’s annual Fur Rendezvous winter festival, which features outdoor events like a snow-sculpting contest and a snowshoe softball tournament, had to make adjustments. Events like high school ski meets and sled-dog races have been canceled, shortened, delayed or relocated.
One of the premier Alaska sports events of the year, the U.S. national cross country skiing championships that drew hundreds of participants and spectators to Kincaid Park in January, was pulled off only because of manmade snow stockpiled since the start of winter, volunteer work by a shovel brigade and some last-minute course rerouting.
It was a close call, said Kikkan Randall, executive director of the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage, which hosted the event and maintains the Kincaid trails, along with another 60 kilometers elsewhere in the city.
The last race of the championship series was conducted amid rain-created slush and standing water in the stadium area. Luckily it was a sprint that required just a short course of a little over 1 kilometer, Randall said.
“If we had had to hold more races that week, or if we had to have a distance race that day, we would have been in trouble,” she said.
The connection between bad snow conditions in Anchorage and climate change is a bit complex, as explained by Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service.
The trend in Anchorage and elsewhere in Alaska is not toward less snow. Warming actually correlates to more precipitation in the Southcentral region and the rest of Alaska, as warmer air holds more moisture.
Rather, the problem for winter sport lovers is that the snow arrives later in the season than it did previously, Brettschneider said.
Though average snowfall in most of Alaska has increased in midwinter over the past decades, it has decreased in October and November, Brettschneider said. That means that over the course of winter seasons, dry spells or warm spells that are part of the natural weather variations have more influence on the season total, he said.
“So really, the snow season has been getting squeezed into a smaller period,” he said. “Instead of all your snow falling in, say, 130 days, now it all falls in, say, 110 days. Then you’re more subject to that internal variability.”
Variability has been the hallmark of this Alaska winter.
Thanks to a persistent southerly atmospheric flow, the December-to-January period was warmest on record statewide, Brettschneider said. Because that southerly flow brought in tropical moisture as well as tropical heat, it also created Alaska’s wettest January on record, he said. And statewide, it was also the snowiest month, at least since 1940, he said. High-elevation spots and more northerly areas have been buried in snow.
That did not help Anchorage’s snowpack. Brettschneider said Anchorage logged its third-wettest January on record. “It was just rain. Almost no snow,” he said.
The January rains were followed by a February that stayed warm but was the driest on record in Anchorage, meaning there was almost no snow to replace what was washed away by the earlier rains, Brettschneider said.
March started out warm as well, with record temperatures on Sunday that hit an official 46 degrees but exceeded 50 degrees in some parts of Anchorage.
Effects of the bad conditions are not trivial, noted Malinda Chase,a tribal liaison working for a University of Alaska-affiliated science organization.
In a news bulletin sent Wednesday, Chase lamented this winter’s lack of opportunities for dog mushing, ice fishing, hunting and trapping and, in general, travel over snow for both food-gathering and fun in much of the state.
“This affects our health by decreasing our range of loved activities or much needed seasonal practices that feed our soul, along with our families and communities,” Chase said in the bulletin issued by the Alaska Tribal Resilience Learning Network.
Randall, a former U.S. Ski Team star, three-time World Cup sprint champion and Olympic gold medalist, said she has had lots of experience with erratic conditions in Anchorage and elsewhere.
She remembers having to be shuttled up to higher elevations in Anchorage for practices and races. Another memorable experience was at the 2012 national championships in Craftsbury, Vermont, that required her and other top U.S. women to ski 30 kilometers by circling continuously on a 1.7-kilometer loop.
A cherished memory is from Russia in 2007, when Randall finished third in a sprint race, the first of her many podium spots. The race was memorable for another reason: It was staged on a platform of ice blocks that soldiers cut from the Volga River and arrayed in a loop a little over a kilometer long. “The whole thing was strange,” she said.
While bad conditions occurred in the past, they are becoming more common, especially at lower elevations like sea-level Anchorage, scientists say. Within the state, dangerous rain-on-snow events have increased in frequency, according to scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In the wider Arctic, where most of the increased precipitation in coming years is expected to be in the form of rain rather than snow, according to various studies.
The changes are troubling for the ski industry.
“Climate change is the number one threat to the snowsports industry,” the Colorado-based National Ski Areas Association says on its website.
Several high-profile winter athletes are part of a climate-change awareness movement called Protect Our Winters. They include U.S. Ski Team member Gus Schumacher of Anchorage, whose climate activity got pushback in Congress from one Republican politician, U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of oil-producing Louisiana.
International Ski Federation officials, who have been coping with lack of snow at events like the recently concluded World Alpine championships in Austria, are considering adjustments to the World Cup calendar in response to climate change.
In Anchorage, Randall said, ski club officials are also contemplating next steps.
One change would be an expansion of the snowmaking system, which was installed in 2014 and first used in 2016. “Snowmaking is something that we feel is super-critical,” she said.
More terrain could be covered if the club used portable machines that could be moved to new places, as long as there is some kind of water source, she said.
Other adjustments could enable snowmaking in warmer weather conditions than is currently possible. For now, the trail team needs temperatures to be 23 degrees Fahrenheit or colder to manufacture snow with the blower system, Randall said. The system relies on well water that comes out of the ground warm, so the club is looking into ways to cool that water to loosen the 23-degree threshold, she said.
Another option is year-to-year snow storage, Randall said. In some European and Canadian spots, ski organizations conserve natural snow, grooming it during the winter and then scooping it back up to store in insulated piles over the summer, she said.
“There are some places in Europe that have snow that is 10 years old at the bottom of those piles,” she said.
A big worry is how to keep enthusiasm from flagging. Randall said the club sees trouble signs in event participation. The Feb. 2 Ski For Women, a celebratory event that raises money for charity, drew only 300 participants this year; normally there are at least 1,000. The Junior Nordic program serves 900 children, but many of this year’s practices were canceled because of rain or other adverse conditions.
With so little snow on the ground, some skiers have shifted to skating on frozen lakes and ponds. The activity that has come to be known as “wild ice skating” has a growing following.
Outdoor ice skating has its own hazards, however.
A skater in Haines died after falling through ice in early February; his body was retrieved after a dayslong search.
Calving glaciers, often thought of as a melt-related summer hazard, can also affect winter lake skaters. In mid-February, two skaters on Portage Lake narrowly escaped serious injury after a chunk of ice cleaved off Portage Glacier and crashed through the lake surface, exposing open water and stranding them until they could be rescued. The U.S. Forest Service followed that event with a warning about the possibility of similar events happening to lake users at Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau.
Brettschneider said the growing number of wild ice skaters should take heed of the hazards associated with glaciers, even though melt is more of a summer phenomenon.
“Glaciers move the entire year,” he said. “They are being pushed by millions of tons of ice from higher up the slope. And, you know, gravity doesn’t take the winter off.”
For those recreationists who still want snow, he said, it can be found at high elevations in the mountains, in places like the mountains of Anchorage’s Chugach State Park.
“Once you get up a few thousand feet, you actually find winter,” he said. “You’ve got to work a little bit, but there is some winter reaction to be found. Just not where it’s most convenient.”
This story has been supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems,
http://solutionsjournalism.org.
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