Skiing in Scotland: Reasons to be cheerful about the 2024/25 season
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Earlier this month, the Nevis Range ski centre near Fort William announced that rather than starting its 2024/5 ski season in December as usual, it would instead be waiting until February before welcoming skiers to its slopes, unless “exceptional snow conditions” materialise before then.
“The hard reality is that we can’t sustain the ski season as we once did,” reads a post on the Nevis Facebook page. “Over the last few years, January has provided only one or two skiable days at most, with last season yielding just three days of skiing overall... our team is as passionate as ever about skiing, but climate change is a reality that’s forced us to rethink our winter operations.”
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Hide AdBroadly speaking, the Nevis announcement has divided snow-sliding people into two groups: the pessimists and the optimists. To those in the first group, the shortening of the Nevis ski season is merely the latest illustration of the fact that the Scottish ski industry is fundamentally doomed by our warming climate, and that the end is nigh, perhaps even very nigh.
In any conversation of the goings-on at Nevis, members of Team Pessimist are likely to bring up the fact that another Scottish ski centre, The Lecht, put out an SoS on its social media channels at the end of last season, informing customers that they had set up a Crowdfunder and were looking to raise £35,000 “to help us continue into the future.” The Crowdfunder page described the 2023/24 season’s snow conditions as “dire” and stated: “We do not want to be forced to shut down the centre.”
The pessimists are also fond of pointing to the prediction made by renowned ecologist Adam Watson in 2004, that the Scottish ski industry might only have 20 years left, which would bring us up to... exactly now. Watson, they argue, was on the money, and soon, just as he predicted, Scotland’s ski centres will surely be forced to throw in the towel, as snowfall becomes even less reliable and periods of winter thaw become more prolonged.
Given that Scotland’s three worst skiing winters on record (not including the Covid years) all occurred in the last decade – 16/17, 18/19 and 23/24 – it might seem that the naysayers are onto something. However, there is a counter-argument, and it’s more convincing that you might think.
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Hide AdAccording to the optimists, while climate change may indeed bring Scotland’s ski centres grinding to a halt at some point, that day is still many years in the future, and they argue that the Nevis announcement was simply the latest example of Scotland’s ski industry boxing clever and adapting in order to survive. (The Lecht, having hit its Crowdfunder target, will be opening as normal this winter.)
On the shortening of the season at Nevis, the optimists will point out that, back in the early days of Scottish skiing, spring tended to be the preferred time to head to the hills anyway. Scotland’s ski pioneers understood that, even in a good snow year, January can often be unpleasant at altitude: dark, bitterly cold and frequently blowing a hoolie. By tweaking their opening dates, then, Nevis perhaps aren’t so much giving up on January as accepting that it was never the best time to go skiing in the first place.
On the future of the Scottish ski industry more generally, meanwhile, members of Team Optimist are happy to discuss that Adam Watson prediction. If the ski industry is supposed to be on its knees by now, they point out, how come last winter – even in a very poor snow year – the resorts were able to clock up 55,000 skier days? Surely that demonstrates that there’s still plenty of demand for domestic skiing, in which case even a modest improvement in snowfall could see the numbers come bouncing back?
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Hide AdThen, of course, there’s the question of the timing of the pandemic. Both the 2020/21 and 2021/22 seasons were stellar snow years, and had they not been disrupted by Covid they would have given the Scottish ski industry an almighty boost. In other words: it’s by no means the case that the last few ski seasons have all been disappointing in terms of snowfall – there were in fact a couple of belters, but they didn’t do the ski resorts much good because while the pistes were filling up with the white stuff we were all locked up at home, trying to avoid making each other ill.
Then there’s the optimists’ trump card: the way in which artificial snowmaking technology has taken off over the last couple of decades, something Watson clearly couldn’t have factored into his calculations. Given the lack of natural snow, last season should have been a washout for Glenshee. Thanks to their state-of-the-art Snowfactories, however, they were able to manufacture enough artificial snow to provide beginner and early-intermediate skiing for much of the season, clocking up 27,000 skier days in the process. If they can now get numbers like that in an awful snow year, just imagine what they could achieve in an average one, let alone a good one.
So who’s got it right, the optimists or the pessimists? Long-term, unless something dramatic happens with the Gulf Stream, climate change does seem destined to bring an end to skiing in Scotland. That day could still be decades in the future though, so – for the time being at least – there are still plenty of reasons for the optimists to keep smiling.
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