A Ski Patroller Watches Winter Disappear

We meet Sloane Traverse in a resort break room during what should be peak season. The name sounds invented because it absolutely is—a composite drawn from dozens of conversations with ski patrollers across Colorado's Front Range. Outside the window, bare patches of brown earth interrupt the white like a bad rash. It's mid-January 2026. The mountain is running on maybe 30% of its normal terrain. Sloane has been doing this for twelve years, long enough to remember when December meant something.

So how's the season?

Laughs. You want the PR answer or the real one?

PR answer: "We're making the most of variable conditions and grateful for every day we can get people on snow."

Real answer: This is fucked.

December was the warmest on record in Colorado¹. We've got maybe a fifth of our trails open. I've spent more time this season doing parking lot patrol—literally just standing around making sure people don't hurt themselves walking to the lodge—than actual mountain rescue work.

That's got to be demoralizing.

It's weird, right? I became a ski patroller because I wanted to be outside, in the mountains, doing technical rescue work in extreme conditions. Now the extreme condition is "there's not enough snow to justify having this many of us on staff."

We had a meeting last week where management basically said, "We appreciate your flexibility during this challenging season." Corporate-speak for "some of you aren't getting your full hours."

The thing that gets me? We saw this coming. Not the specific timing—nobody can predict whether December 2025 would be catastrophic versus just bad. But the trend. Snow-water equivalent in the western U.S. has dropped 41% since the early 1980s². The ski season has shrunk by 34 days. These aren't projections. This already happened.

You started in 2014. What's changed since then?

Everything and nothing. The job description is the same—first aid, avalanche control, mountain rescue, making sure drunk tourists don't kill themselves. But the context is completely different.

When I started, we'd have maybe one or two seasons per decade that were genuinely bad. Now bad is... I don't want to say normal, because we still get good years. But it's frequent enough that you can't write it off as random variation anymore.

The practical stuff: We're doing avalanche control on terrain that used to be stable because the snowpack is so variable now. We're dealing with more injuries because when you've got limited terrain open, you get crowding. People on runs above their skill level because there's nowhere else to go.

And we're working longer seasons. Resorts are trying to stretch into summer with mountain biking and hiking, which means year-round employment sounds great until you realize it's because winter can't sustain us anymore³.

The National Ski Patrol says members provide about $400 million in value to the industry. Do you feel valued?

Long pause.

That number is probably accurate. Without us, resorts literally can't operate. You need certified patrollers for insurance, for legal liability, for basic safety.

But valued? I pay about $4,500 a year out of pocket for my own training and equipment³. My base pay hasn't meaningfully increased in five years while resort lift ticket prices have gone up 30%.

So there's this gap between "you're essential" and "we're going to compensate you accordingly."

That's why you're seeing unionization efforts. Park City had a 12-day strike last year that worked⁴. Telluride's patrol authorized a strike during the holidays. These aren't radical demands. We're talking about health insurance that doesn't suck, supervisor pay that reflects responsibility, retention bonuses so resorts stop training people who leave after two years because they can't afford to stay.

What's the resort response?

Always the same: "We're a family, we love what we do, this isn't about money."

And yeah, I do love it. But love doesn't pay for recertification courses or replace my avalanche beacon when it fails. There's something gross about an industry that makes hundreds of millions in profit asking workers to subsidize operations out of passion.

What's the demographic of ski patrol like?

The average National Ski Patrol member is 60 years old and has been doing it for 22 years³.

Pauses.

That's a workforce approaching retirement with no clear succession plan. A lot of the older patrollers are volunteers—retired doctors, lawyers, people with other income who do this because they love skiing. Which is great, but it's not sustainable as a professional model.

I'm part of the 25% who are women, which is up from 23% a few years ago. Glacial progress. Pun intended.

The culture has shifted—less of the old-school macho bullshit, more recognition that you don't need to be a 200-pound dude to do technical rescue work. But we're still overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and the volunteer model skews heavily toward people who have the financial cushion to work for free.

In Colorado specifically, we're more likely to be paid professionals than volunteers, which creates this weird tension. The National Ski Patrol is built around volunteer culture—the red jacket, the service ethic, the "we do this because we love mountains" narrative. That works great until you're trying to negotiate a contract and management is like, "But you're supposed to do this out of passion!"

Do you think about leaving?

All the time.

Not because I don't love the work. I do. But I'm 38. I need to think about long-term financial stability, health insurance that covers more than catastrophic injury, maybe eventually having kids. And I'm watching the profession become less viable.

Some of Colorado's smallest ski areas didn't open at all this year¹. Kendall Mountain, Ouray, Lake City—just closed. If you're a patroller at one of those resorts, what do you do? Find another mountain that's also struggling? Retrain for something else?

Maybe that's too dramatic. Skiing isn't going to disappear entirely. But the economics are brutal. Half of all Northeast ski resorts could be gone by 2050. Ninety percent of western resorts might not be financially viable by 2085 if emissions aren't cut².

Those timelines sound distant until you realize 2050 is when I'd be planning to retire.

What does a typical day look like now versus five years ago?

Five years ago, mid-January, I'd be doing avalanche control at 6 AM, running first aid calls all morning, maybe a backcountry rescue in the afternoon. Real technical work.

This season? I'm doing a lot of waiting. Waiting for snow. Waiting for terrain to open. Waiting for enough coverage to make avalanche control worth doing.

We had this absurd moment last week where we spontaneously recruited skiers after a storm to take first runs down slopes just to tamp down the powder so it wouldn't blow away¹. That's not normal. That's desperation. We're rationing snow like it's a scarce resource, which... laughs ...it is now, I guess.

How do you deal with that emotionally?

The emotional toll is weird. You show up to work and the mountain is brown and you're supposed to be enthusiastic about the guest experience, but everyone can see this isn't working.

Management sends emails about "making the most of challenging conditions" and "appreciating flexibility," and you want to scream, "Just say it: there's no snow and we're all pretending this is fine!"

What do you tell people who are thinking about becoming ski patrollers?

Honestly? I don't know anymore.

Three years ago I would've said, "Do it, it's the best job in the world." Now I'm like... trails off ...do you have a backup plan? Can you afford to pay for your own training? Are you okay with the possibility that this profession might not exist in its current form in 20 years?

That sounds bleak. But I also think about the Ouray Ice Park, which has been operating for 31 years and this is the first year it hasn't opened by January¹. There's more rock than ice. The executive director said it's been "incredibly warm."

What do you say to someone who's built their entire career around ice climbing when there's no ice?

So what would you say?

Be clear-eyed about what you're getting into. This job is changing faster than any of us anticipated. The mountains aren't going anywhere, but the snow is.

And if you're doing this because you love it—which you have to, because the pay sure isn't the draw—just know that love might not be enough to sustain a career.

Do you think the industry will adapt?

Some resorts will. The big ones with money for snowmaking, with diverse revenue streams, with the ability to pivot to year-round operations. They'll survive, though they'll look different. Vail Resorts isn't going anywhere.

But the small community hills, the places that can't afford million-dollar snowmaking systems? Those are already dying.

And here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: Even the big resorts are propped up by people like me subsidizing operations. We pay for our own training, we work for below-market wages, we cover gaps in staffing because we care about the mountain.

That model works until it doesn't. Until enough of us look around and go, "Why am I doing this?"

The 2024-25 season was described as a "blockbuster year" for skier visits. That sounds positive?

Laughs bitterly.

Yeah, it sounds great until you realize it means more pressure on limited terrain, more injuries, more demands on patrollers who are already stretched thin. Management sees that and thinks, "Great, we're succeeding!"

We see it and think, "This is unsustainable."³

What would make you stay?

Long pause.

Honest answer? Better pay, real health insurance, acknowledgment that climate change isn't a future problem. It's happening now and we need to plan accordingly.

But also... pauses ...I'd stay if I believed the industry was serious about adapting rather than just extracting value until the snow runs out.

I love this job. I love being in the mountains, I love the technical challenge, I love helping people.

But I'm tired of being asked to prop up an industry that won't acknowledge its own precarity. And I'm tired of watching something I love disappear while everyone acts like it's fine.

Footnotes

1. https://www.cpr.org/2026/01/07/ouray-ice-park-ski-no-snow-warm-winter-climate-change-colorado/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. https://eos.org/features/how-the-ski-industry-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-climate-activism ↩ ↩²

3. https://www.cpr.org/2025/12/25/ski-patrol-leader-on-challenges-changes/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. https://unofficialnetworks.com/2025/12/30/the-biggest-ski-industry-stories-of-2025/ ↩