The Perfect (Winter) Storm
By Jules Older, Editor-in-Chief, Ski Press USA and Ski Press Canada

Is the ski cup half empty or half full? Here's the rosy view, one shared by many of my friends and colleagues: Skiing will always be with us. It’s just too much fun to die.

Here’s my view: So was fox hunting. And chariot racing.

But maybe they’re right. With a bit of luck and a decent tailwind, skiing might well survive, say, forever. Still, luck isn’t always good, and tailwinds have been known to turn into tornados. Thus, let us consider the perfect winter storm.

This one has three converging components. What happens if our luck doesn’t hold, and the grim trio comes hurtling down on us all at once? Here’s how our world might look in 2025. . . .

Folks in Fairbanks and Albany and Toledo are luxuriating in unprecedented winter warmth, but skiing has suffered. Except in freak years like the epic 2011, there’s little snow falling on mountains—not with any consistency, and not “when it’s supposed to.” Gore was right—global warming is real.

Europe’s lower slopes have reverted to pasture; in the foothills of the Alps, goats have replaced skiers. New Zealand’s already short season is down, most years, to three weeks. But skiing in Dubai is thriving; they now have sixteen indoor hills open 24/7, and three more under construction.

In the U.S., the only New England ski resorts left are Killington and Jay Peak in Vermont, Sugarloaf and the newly important Saddleback in Maine. All four have given up opening before New Year’s; and are spending big bucks promoting spring skiing. Their slogan: “April is way cool!” Except for Jiminy Peak, which had the foresight to install plastic bristles in 2114, and Wachusett, which covered itself with a dome the following year, there is not a single outdoor ski area left in southern New England. The entire mid-Atlantic ski business has been wiped out, along with most of the Midwest, New Mexico, southern Utah and California. Brian Head is now “the country’s biggest mountain-bike terrain park.”

North of the border, eastern Quebec is getting by—barely—but the once-thriving Eastern Townships and Laurentians are pretty much history. Vineyards dominate the beginner slopes of Bromont and Tremblant. Chateau Mont Sutton debuted (to a lukewarm review in Wine Spectator) in 2022. The ski clubs of Ontario are now tennis, swim and curling clubs; they’ve raised their dues to pay for pools and to remove rusting chairlifts. Still, Whistler survives, as does Mont Sainte-Anne. Revelstoke still offers skiing, but only on the top 1,000 vertical. Sunshine Village changed its name to Snow Peak back in 2011.

With few competitors, Alaska has become the last truly profitable American ski zone. . .except that two other whirlwinds of the perfect storm are now threatening profits there, too. One is global fattening. In 2025, the national obesity rate is pushing 80 percent. Canadians are at 75 percent; the Brits, 68. Sixpack chairlifts are down to fourpacks—not only were the seats too narrow, but the combined weight was too great. Worse, since skiing and snowboarding are falling sports, this ever-growing slice of the population pie simply cannot participate. If they fall, they can’t get up.

As if global warming and global fattening weren’t enough, there’s a third element of the storm: global slothing. Social scientists have finally confirmed that people today are significantly more sedentary than their parents were. The World Health Organization declared just last year that, “with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon Basin, the proportion of sedentary or near-sedentary adults now exceeds 89 percent.”

These sloths would rather sit and watch than stand and play. When they look at family photos of the old-timers enjoying winter, they view their grandparents’ rosy-cheeked smiles with a puzzlement that borders on disbelief. “Go skiing? Not when we haven’t been to EasyLand, the hot, new combo NASCAR track, shopping mall, casino and beach in Georgia.” As nearly everyone knows, EasyLand was to be built just north of Miami until that region started experiencing annual floods much earlier than predicted. The ski industry is not the only recreation arena living in reduced circumstances.

Global warming, global fattening and global slothing, all coming on strong at roughly the same time. It’s the perfect winter storm. And it may be heading our way.

Some might say it’s already here.



Addendum
Wintersteiger Rental Software

In our review of business software in the May issue, we somehow overlooked the “easyrent” rental software from Wintersteiger. This is a complete software solution for rental shops. One of the more recent innovations in the POS portion of the system is the ability to process credit card transactions from within the program, not merely track credit card information. Another new feature is an export database that allows shops to extract data from the system to integrate into other programs. Easyrent has been developed through interaction with the 500 or so shops that have used it worldwide (including 25 to 30 current users in the U.S.). It has an integrated online reservation system, tracks customer purchases and sales items, creates reports on rental inventory and calculates binding settings. The system can interface with Wintersteiger’s speedtronic binding test machine to keep a record of the unit’s performance—a handy feature if there’s ever a liability issue. The system can also accept electronic signatures, and thus can store rental records digitally rather than on paper, reducing the hassle of recordkeeping.

For more information on easyrent, contact Wintersteiger at 1-800-277-7440.