Drought forces Holiday Mountain ski resort to cancel season 'This is exactly what the UN (climate change) report is talking about,' scientist says By: Temur Durrani Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Monday, Aug. 9, 2021 Last Modified: 7:11 PM CDT Monday, Aug. 9, 2021 Updates

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The pre-emptive closure of a popular Manitoba ski resort — well before the winter season begins — is the perfect example of how the UN’s report on climate change is “devastatingly interconnected” to shifting local weather patterns, leading scientists say.

Holiday Mountain announced Monday it is suspending operations for the 2021-22 season, for the first time in its 60-year history, citing ongoing drought conditions affecting the La Rivière resort’s snowmaking water sources.

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That same day, the United Nations released its most comprehensive assessment of climate change to date, sounding the alarm about what is to come. Secretary General António Guterres called it a “code red for humanity.”

Bernice Later, general manager of Holiday Mountain, told the Free Press it’s like one disaster after another.

“As if COVID-19 wasn’t already enough, we’ve now had to deal with this even bigger blow,” Later said in a phone interview Monday.

“In many ways, the pandemic was something we could actually handle — with distancing, Plexiglas barriers and whatnot — but this is just something that’s completely beyond our control.”

Every year, the resort begins to sell its seasonal memberships and passes around early August. “It’s kind of a tradition,” Later said about the more than 20,000 visitors that come to the small town of roughly 200 residents during the winter.

Holiday Mountain directly employs 65 people and a majority of the town’s economy depends entirely on the tourism-related revenue that stems from the annual visitors.

For this reason, La Rivière takes the resort business very seriously. In the off season, months of work and thousands upon thousands of dollars are spent to ensure everything is in order for the winter.

“We bring experts from outside the province, we do maintenance, inspections and it’s just a lot of money spent on this planning,” Later said.

This year, however, things are in stark contrast to the otherwise booming local destination about 130 kilometres southwest from Winnipeg.

That’s because the Pembina River, which Holiday Mountain uses to make snow for its slopes, is experiencing a historic dry spell. Depletion due to a concurrent drought is so extreme that it would take rainfall causing at least 10 to 12 feet of accumulated water before the resort remotely reaches its requirements.

“We’d been getting inquiries from customers about what this year would be like,” Later said. “And we realized, it would be completely irresponsible if we sold memberships when we can’t guarantee our services.

“It’s heartbreaking, but it’s just our new reality. We’re all learning to cope.”

David Barber is a Canada Research Chair in arctic system science and directs the University of Manitoba’s centre for earth observation science. He said Holiday Mountain’s devastating loss is “perfectly illustrative of the human consequences” from climate change.

“What we have to understand is that this is exactly what the UN report is talking about,” Barber said Monday. “Our weather conditions are getting extreme and unpredictable — and the toll of it all is not about the planet and how it copes at all.

The earth will be fine, it has always learnt to adapt. It’s about how climate change impacts us as humans and the way we’ve already set up our businesses, our livelihoods and our economy. That is the drastic shift we should be worried about.”

Among other findings, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a detailed report Monday that droughts like the one plaguing Manitoba are happening 1.7 times as often as they previously did.

‘The earth will be fine, it has always learnt to adapt. It’s about how climate change impacts us as humans and the way we’ve already set up our businesses, our livelihoods and our economy. That is the drastic shift we should be worried about.” – David Barber, Canada Research Chair

On top of that, severe heat waves that happened only once every 50 years are now happening roughly once a decade. Tropical cyclones are also getting stronger and, under the most optimistic scenario, summertime sea ice atop the Arctic Ocean will vanish entirely at least once by 2050.

Later hopes Holiday Mountain will be back by the winter season of 2022. But at the back of her mind, worries and anxiety have been clouding.

“My family has run this place since 1959 and we haven’t ever seen anything like this,” she said. “If this kind of pattern continues, I’m not sure how our little town will cope anymore. It’s all very, very frightening.”

temur.durrani@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @temurdur