Four Seasons: Colorado Water In A Changing Climate

Editor’s Note: Over the next year, The Colorado Independent will examine, season by season, the effects climate change is having on the state’s water supply and the many forms of life it sustains.

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, CO – By Lars Gesing for The Colorado Independent. Every time Stella Molotch finishes a run down the ski slope at Steamboat, her dad Noah slips two Skittles into her tiny hands. It’s a reward – yet another step forward as the six year old is learning to ski.

People across the Rocky Mountain ranges long have quipped that kids here often learn to ski before they know how to walk. But these days, this powder-based parenting style is increasingly born out of necessity rather than impatience.

As winters are warming and mountain regions bear the brunt of the immediate consequences, the mantra may as well be: We better teach them now, while there’s still snow to ski. Or, to put it another way: Noah Molotch and parents like him might have to buy far fewer Skittles in the not-so-distant future.

A growing body of research suggests that the changing climate and subsequently warmer winters will drastically shrink the snowpack in mountain states such as Colorado. Already, across the American West, the amount of snow per year over roughly the last 40 years has diminished by 41 percent. For now, Colorado’s altitude and colder temperatures may still protect our winters, in effect, buying some time. But for a state that gets 80 percent of its annual water supply from its snowpack, the future is bleak. Maintaining life as we know it in Colorado is tied to its water supply, and that supply, on both sides of Colorado’s mountains, is inextricably linked to the life and death of snow.

READ MORE in The Colorado Independent.

Silverton Mountain, March 2010. (Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)