Trampers, skiers and mountaineers are among the first to see the climate changing, but are they making their own changes in response?

Tom Hadley and his partner Tōrea knew exactly where they wanted to go. They had pored over maps, called people for information about the incredibly remote area they were visiting, and plotted routes over toothy ridges and into valleys carved out by glaciers. But the reality wasn’t quite what they were expecting. 

Days into a trip in Te Rua-o-te-moko (Fiordland) at the start of this year, they had to reroute a previously simple descent. “We had some photos we had seen from three or four years earlier at the same time of year, showing a ramp of snow that would let us descend easily,” Hadley, a long-time fan of trips deep in the mountains, says. “But the snow was gone, leaving a challenging system of bluffs we couldn’t get down.” They ended up taking the long way around.

For people who spend time outdoors, there’s no way to ignore that a warming climate is happening now. If you go skiing every winter, you might notice more rocks and tussocks poking up through thinning snow cover. If you’re climbing mountains, you might have to change access routes as crevasses yawn open on melting glaciers. As Hadley found, if you’re plotting complex trans-alpine routes, you can’t rely on the topographic maps being accurate, as reducing snow leaves cliffs where there had once been frozen water. Everywhere in the world, high-altitude mountain areas are warming much faster than the global average. 

At the same time, outdoor activities can generate lots of emissions, especially in the transport required to get to these areas. Activities like skiing and multi-day tramping are often undertaken by people with higher incomes (as research commissioned by DOC in 2020 has found) – people who could skip out on the melting frontcountry to go heliskiing or take a trip to Canada to do some ice climbing instead. So what is New Zealand’s outdoor community saying – and doing – about climate change? 

“We go to these places because they’re beautiful and special – global warming puts everything we love about the mountains, from snow cover to the health of rivers, at risk,” says Megan Dimozantos, president of the Federated Mountain Clubs. It’s something she’s observed herself: on a 2021 trip to the Snow White glacier deep in the Olivine Wilderness Area, she got stuck with her companions after discovering that a photo she’d been sent of the glacier was now 500 metres of bare rock. 

The business of skiing in a warming world

Snow sports are another particularly obvious place where the reality of a warming world is visible. North Island skiing has a limited lifespan at the current rate of warming; three particularly warm years pushed the previous owners of the Ruapehu commercial skifields into voluntary administration, before the government bailed the company out for $7m. 

Without government money, but even more affected, are the small club fields on the slopes of the volcanoes. Tukino on Ruapehu and Awakino on Taranaki didn’t have enough snow to run their full tows this year. Porters Pass skifield in Canterbury has already closed for the season; so has the Rainbow Ski Area near Nelson, Temple Basin and Mt Cheeseman ski field. “The snowline retreat is real,” reads a post on Craigieburn ski field’s Facebook page, where only two of the tows are operating due to reduced snow. 

The bigger, more southern skifields have fared better. Treble Cone received 48cm of snow in the Otago storm last week; the field above the sparkling Lake Wānaka should be open well into the school holidays. “In the short term, it’s the increased volatility of weather that concerns us – we had a drought, nearly a month without snow, then a big dump at the start of July and August. Little and often is what we’d prefer!” says Ewan Mackie, Treble Cone’s manager and the sustainability lead at parent tourism country Real NZ, which also owns the Cardrona skifield. Climate change will cause extreme winds more often in winter; a snow field can’t open if everyone on the chairlifts is going to be rattled in the icy blasts. “We’ve had to be flexible with our operations,” Mackie says. If it’s windy, for instance, they might close the upper basin. 

As businesses, skifields are particularly exposed to the existential risk of warmer and less predictable weather, making advocating for climate change a good business strategy. The skiing industry in the US has lost more than $5 billion to climate change in the last two decades, and ski destination Switzerland will have 80 fewer snow days per year by 2071.

On the Cardrona website (also owned by Real NZ), it’s already possible to toggle between a “summer” and “winter” mode. In a single click, images of billowing snow powder melt away, replaced by mountain bikes, go-karts and dry hills, like watching what climate change is doing at an ultra-fast speed. It’s a move attempted by ski fields around the world as an attempt to diversify their businesses in a warming world. 

Cold winters with steady snowfall are important for lots of reasons, say Marian Krogh– including economic ones. She works as a physio: less skiing and snow means less work in the clinic. (Arguably a positive from ACC’s perspective). Physios with less work spend less money in the cafe’s. Hotels are unfilled and hire fewer workers. “Every day it rains, not snows, there is less work; the outdoor community is a canary in the coalmine, it’s really impacting our livelihood.” Krogh lived seasonally in Colorado for years as a ski guide, where she saw the work of Protect Our Winters (POW), an organisation founded by snowboarder Jeremy Jones.

POW does climate advocacy in different countries, with a focus on snow sports.  “My flatmates and I would sit on the couch feeling sad about the climate – I wanted to do something, so I started the POW New Zealand chapter,” Krogh says. She’s the organisations’ lead advocate in New Zealand. 

How do you reduce emissions when you use high-carbon transport? 

Cardrona and Treble Cone have undertaken detailed carbon accounting over the last half decade. Skifields are particularly high emission businesses. “We rely on fossil fuel powered technology,” Mackie says. “Fuel combustion is the biggest source of emissions by far, we groom the slopes with snow groomers, people, goods, materials all have to come up the mountain in vehicles.” The field also relies partially on diesel fuel to supplement the electricity it gets from the power grid, to fuel the snow makers that supplement the increasingly unpredictable cold stuff from the sky. 

Ironically, efforts to reduce the overall emissions of the field can make it directly responsible for more carbon dioxide: the fields run free buses from the base of the mountain to reduce the number of car trips. By the conventions of emissions accounting, this actually increases the amount of “scope one” emissions the company is directly responsible for. “But we choose a holistic understanding of climate impacts, so we can’t just wash our hands of it.” They’ve also banned non-recyclable waste on the mountain, as emissions from waste was a place the field could have direct impact.

Mackie can’t ignore that most people get to Queenstown to go skiing in a plane, especially the “high value” international tourists. The business model of New Zealand’s skifields is basically built on this assumption; without people flying from Auckland and Australia during the pandemic, all major skifields lost millions of dollars. 

Tramping clubs, which are more local, have more opportunities to change the transport emissions of their clubs. The FMCs member clubs, which include caving, canyoning, paragliding, packrafting, skiing, mountaineering as well as tramping clubs, have started efforts through their “recreation transition” campaign. “We’ve started doing ridesharing or shuttling together, so people don’t individually drive to road ends,” Dimozantos says. This could have other benefits by lowering costs: the expense of transport is a major barrier to New Zealanders taking part in outdoor activities. 

The whitewater clubs are experimenting with doing shuttles past rapids on bike or foot, rather than using cars; collapsible, lightweight packrafts mean that exciting trips down rivers don’t depend on helicopter drop-offs. The group’s “love our huts” campaign also carries out work maintaining for huts and tracks that would otherwise be done by DOC with a helicopter. 

So… what are outdoor businesses and communities doing about climate change?

While climate change is clearly an existential threat to the snow sports industry, it might seem surprising that more organisations haven’t signed up to advocacy like Protect Our Winters. “I wonder if the personality of someone who spends a lot of time outside is not the personality of someone who spends a lot of time engaging in the civic sense – ‘I want to be by myself in the hills, not in the city talking to people’,” says Krogh. Politicians are happy to talk about how Aotearoa’s remarkable natural landscape is a draw for tourists or an asset to protect – but the people leading climate groups don’t often talk about their love of snowy adventures when they’re giving speeches or presenting to select committee. 

Krogh thinks this is partially because people are afraid of being seen as hypocrites. “I hear ‘skiing is elitist, when you stop heli-skiing we’ll talk to you, your sport has such a high carbon footprint so you can’t talk’.” Lots of that criticism is deserved – especially because the people who can afford to go skiing (and particularly heli-skiing) are the people who can also afford to lower their personal carbon footprints by taking fewer flights and driving less. The comments under a recent short film POW in the US made to address the fear of hypocrisy make it clear that many people think that individual emissions are still worth reducing while advocating for big-picture change. “It feels really disingenuous to just hand wave any modicum of personal responsibility so long as it’s fun for you,” one commenter says, with dozens echoing similar sentiments. 

But to Krogh, the focus on systemic change, not individually shaming people flying around the world to go skiing, is essential. “Often the biggest impact is combining our voices – we advocate for strong policies that mean everyone has choices to take public transport, or bike – or drive if they need to.” POW has run several “biking to the skifield” days, and is advocating for a public bus between Wānaka and Queenstown. RealNZ is supportive “It would be fabulous to get off a plane in Queenstown, catch a bus to Wānaka and then to the skifield, use public transport in and around Queenstown and Wānaka, do a whole trip without needing a car,” Mackie says. 

POW has also encouraged skifields to submit on government bills connected to climate change. Mackie acknowledges that Real NZ doesn’t have a set advocacy policy to submit on every single climate-change-related bill they can – but they’re spoken for a number of bills and local government initiatives; the container reuse scheme, public transport in Queenstown, electrification, and more. “As Cardrona and Treble Cone we have a large voice – we’ve used it well, but we could scale that up more, and talk about all the work we still have to do,” he says. 

Being outside is about what’s worth protecting 

There’s a tendency Mackie has noticed in his sustainability work at RealNZ, where the focus is all about reducing emissions: doing less harm (but still doing harm) rather than actually improving the environment. Seeing thousands of native trees slowly growing on Treble Cone’s slopes, with more to come, makes him hopeful. “We don’t plant trees because we’re going to offset emissions, we’re not into that,” Mackie says in his gentle Scottish accent. “Regenerating biodiversity is good for the whenua immediately, it’s not just about getting bummed out because you’ve driven up to go skiing for the day.”

This emotional element is key to the future of spending time in the outdoors, even in a warming world. Hadley has spent years returning to Fiordland, both to go tramping and to do conservation work. Seeing the face of mountains he knows change as snow melts carries lots of grief. “It’s not a human relationship, but it feels like grief, to see these places you love changing,” he says. 

The reality of the climate crisis means that more of his friends are planning trips in Fiordland, rather than further north; a warming planet shapes how he imagines future trips too. “Sometimes I’ll be in a group planning a trip, and we’ll avoid certain places, knowing the travel would be difficult, knowing you’ll feel sad because it isn’t the same.” He hopes that adapting to climate change will be an invitation for trampers and climbers to think more about how they treat the natural world, to engage with mana whenua. “We have to think broadly about what it means to go on trips in the mountains,” he says. 

That thought of the future is what Mackie holds on to, too, although his hopes are person shaped just as often as mountain shaped. “I have a 20-month-old son, I want him to be skiing and snowboarding in 20 years like I did,” Mackie says. “It sounds cheesy, talking about tamariki and future generations – but I think it really plays for people.” 

Joy, outdoor enthusiasts say, is important. “I went skiing this morning, it was so fun, the mountains were beautiful, everyone was hooting and hollering with delight,” Krogh says. Spending time outside reminds her what she’s advocating for. 

Preserving recreational trips to the mountains isn’t the most important reason to do everything possible to limit the extent of climate change and the damage that is already happening. A warming planet impacts every part of life: millions of homes have been and will be destroyed, millions of people need to find new work, thousands of species have been or will become extinct, just to list a few of the impacts. 

Instead, recreation is a starting place: a reminder of how, in a warming world, you can’t run to the mountains to escape the consequences of human damage. “People look at recreation as a selfish thing to do, but it aligns with what we hold dear as a society: wellbeing, appreciation for te taiao, health. Look after nature and nature looks after you – we need to develop that connection,” Dimozantos says. That doesn’t have to look like skiing or tramping: these sports remain expensive, and hurtling downhill with long sticks attached to your feet or carrying heavy packs through snowy forests will never suit everyone. But everyone engages with the outdoors in some way, which means we all have something to lose as the climate heats up. 

People who regularly visit snowy, high-altitude places see these changes already. Ideally, the awe of wild mountains is something they can bring back with them. Hadley has noticed that over years of trips, he’s started to see nature differently. He no longer wonders “how can nature serve my enjoyment” but remembers that the environment is worth protecting in and of itself. “Physical landscapes and ecosystems have their own value, that’s what you learn from time in these environments,” he says. “I come back from these remote places with a different way of thinking about [environmental] crises, a new understanding of why every action is important.”