From artificial clouds to autonomous snow-grooming vehicles, here are 12 ways for ski areas to weather warmer temperatures and less snow.
5 min
Downhill skiing could become an increasingly exotic proposition in a warming world. By midcentury, the U.S. could see 90 fewer days below freezing each year, according to a 2016 study published in the Journal of Climate and based on data from the federally funded North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program. Nearly all ski areas in the U.S. are projected to have at least a 50% shorter season by 2050, according to a 2017 study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and published in the Global Environmental Change journal.
Higher temperatures make snow more elusive on the slopes, cutting into revenues for ski areas. Low snow years between 1999 and 2010 already cost ski areas an estimated $1 billion in revenue, according to a 2012 analysis commissioned by the nonprofits Protect Our Winters and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Today, ski areas run snow guns 24/7 as soon as cold weather hits and send GPS-guided snowcat vehicles to the slopes to distribute snowpack. Snow-making technologies are making rapid advances and could alleviate some of the burden of weather volatility. Winter skiing could also be less of a focus as resorts become year-round destinations and offer more activities. Climate change presents ski areas with an opportunity to reduce their own carbon footprint by switching to cleaner energy sources.
From autonomous snowcats to solar-powered properties, take a look at what ski resorts might look like in the coming years.
Modifying clouds to boost mountain snowpack, or cloud seeding, has been done over Colorado’s ski areas for decades, but was scientifically proven effective only last year. It involves using generators to spray silver iodide into a frigid cloud to turn water droplets into snow, and it can increase snowfalls by up to 15%, says Neil Brackin, the CEO of Colorado-based Advanced Radar Co., a firm that sells weather radar systems. Tomorrow’s generators may be more accurate and deliver more advanced seeding materials into the sky, Mr Brackin says. Cloud-seeding programs could cost ski areas $100,000 to $1 million annually, he says.
Neuschnee GmbH, an Austrian startup, has invested more than $2.2 million to develop a balloon-shaped chamber that artificially recreates a snow-making cloud. Ice particles injected into a wooden-framed structure propped on steel rods and wrapped in nylon membranes bind to water droplets to make up to 1,000 cubic feet of snowflakes a day, enough to fill a midsize truck. Founder Michael Bacher says ski resorts could use the technology to give runs a natural feel and imagines a future where operators deploy fleets of autonomous artificial clouds. The company is looking for new partnerships to continue development.
Developing downhill mountain biking as a seasonal complement to winter sports could let the industry maximize the summer season and diversify revenue streams, says Rob McSkimming, a mountain resort development consultant at Select Contracts, a Canada-based tourism consulting firm. Ski areas could invest more in lift infrastructure like bike carriers and repurpose snow making systems into irrigation systems that water biking trails. “Good dirt is like good snow,” Mr McSkimming says.
Mr Snow, a German startup, sells a carpetlike faux ski hill that rolls out like a mat and has an arrangement of loops on the surface that reproduces gliding sensations, says Jens Reindl, one of the company’s founders. Mr Reindl says the product is beginner-friendly and could become popular in low-altitude ski resorts near urban centres. The mat, which is available for sale in the U.S., comes in modular 65-by-6.5-foot patches and costs $120 for every 10 square feet.
In the future, it may take skiers more twists and turns to reach the bottom of the slope as ski operators seek to have more people use the same patches of snow, says Joe Hession, the majority owner of Mountain Creek Resort in New Jersey. Moving snow blocks to create more jumps, rails, gradual hills and big turns could allow resorts to focus their snow-making capacity on selected segments and do more with less terrain, he says.
Today, snowcat operators drive vehicles equipped with sensors, GPS receivers and tablets to visualize snow depth and distribute fresh snowpack. Mr. Hession sees a day when driverless snowcats wirelessly feed terrain data to automated snow guns that pump out snow on shallow spots more accurately. The ski industry might need to hire more highly skilled and higher paid employees to manage these remote systems, he says.
Temperature increases mean ski resorts will have shrinking windows of cold weather to produce artificial snow, says Brian Fairbank, chairman of the Fairbank Group, which operates three ski resorts in the Northeastern U.S. More efficient, cheaper snow guns that pump out more snow could help make up for this change. One recent innovation is the “Sledgehammer,” a $3,150 snow gun developed by Fairbank that it says converts twice as much water into snow per hour as traditional machines and performs better at higher temperatures for about half the price.
Ski resorts could increasingly turn to green infrastructure like solar panels and wind turbines with the goal to operate 100% on renewable power and diminish their own carbon footprints. Wolf Creek Ski Area in Colorado purchases most of its electricity from green sources year-round, including a 25-acre off-site solar farm. Mountain Creek Resort relies on goats to mow the grass on the slopes in the summer rather than use fuel-intensive machinery. More operators are expected to adopt renewable energy in the future, says Adrienne Saia Isaac, the director of marketing and communications at the National Ski Areas Association, an industry group. “We as an industry can’t simply rely on pivoting to summer business as a climate change solution,” she says.
The Italian startup Nevexn has developed Snow4Ever Thermal, a container-size chiller that freezes water to make up to 1,700 cubic feet of snow a day, almost enough to cover a tennis court with a foot of snow, at above-freezing temperatures. The machine uses solar thermal energy and energy from burning biomass such as wood pellets. The company developed the system with a $2.1 million grant from the European Union and tested it in the Italian Dolomites last year, says Francesco Besana, a co-founder. It plans to commercialize it in the coming years.
Ziplines, climbing walls, water attractions and mountain roller coasters could be increasingly offered year-round as resorts endeavour to be less reliant on winter sports. This shift could come with a new focus on immersive educational experiences like night walks and light shows that introduce visitors to a mountain’s geological history, says Mr McSkimming of Select Contracts.
Indoor ski areas could make up for seasonal variations and provide access to new markets in urban areas, says Dr Natalie Ooi, the director of tourism enterprise programs at Colorado State University. Big Snow American Dream, the country’s first indoor ski area, opened in New Jersey in 2019 and could provide a blueprint for future investments. It boasts a 4-acre skiable area that operates at minus two degrees celsius and has a 48-metre vertical drop, four lifts and snow guns.
Customers could get much better deals by pre-buying season passes to access more resorts, including internationally, as the industry moves to insulate revenues from weather variations, says David Perry, an executive vice president at Alterra Mountain Co., the ski-resort giant. He anticipates passes will represent 60-70% of Alterra’s ticket sales in the coming years, up from 40-50% today. Resorts could also start selling megapasses valid both in summer and winter, says Auden Schendler, a senior vice president in charge of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co.
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Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
