Skiing is a petroleum sport.
Resort skiing is one of the most petroleum-dependent outdoor sports in existence, yet skiers are misled about the entire foundation of their sport.
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When you think of ski resorts, what imagery comes to mind first? You might envision swooshing through an endless path of white powdery snow. You might envision carving through freshly groomed corduroy snow on the first run of the day. You are probably picturing doing all of this while among the pine, spruce, or fir trees of a Colorado, Utah, or California ski slope, with towering peaks in a 360 degree view. You might even imagine the elation of an après ski1 hot chocolate, beer, and burger at your favorite bar at the base of the mountain.
When imagining skiing, did you happen to think about your nylon and/or polyester jacket, long-underwear, and pants? Did you think about the foam and plastic your helmet is made of? How about the plastic and metals your skis are made of?
Maybe the synthetic nylon, polyester, and elastic materials that comprise your beanie (hat), socks, liner gloves, glove insulation and shell material? What about the plastics and foams your goggles are made of?
No?
Okay, let’s try this; Did you think about your car or rental car parked 50 yards from the resort base in the parking lot? How about the gasoline needed to drive you from the nearest airport, which is 5,000 feet of elevation below the resort elevation, or the 60-150 miles you had to drive to get there? Maybe you considered the heating of the lodges, the power required to operate the lifts? The jet fuel that flew you and all your luggage all this way?
Did you think of how those ski runs got there? As in, the clear-cutting of mountainsides to make those ski runs clear, safe and fun? Maybe you pictured the explosives that are used to bomb the mountainside every morning to clear avalanche danger?
Seems odd that none of this comes to mind, given that all of these things are what make your presence at a ski resort possible.
It’s especially interesting, because there is only one single thing that every single element of skiing has in common and is made possible by. Only one single thing that makes the entire ski experience possible from the gear, to getting to the resort, to warming the lodges, to the lifts themselves. Do you know what that one thing is?
It’s fossil fuels.2
Don’t hang up, I promise this post is not a promotion of fossil fuels or the oil and gas industry. It’s a reveal of one of the most expensively curated misconceptions in the outdoor industrial complex today.
How much of skiing is dependent on fossil fuels, really?
It’s not hard to answer how much of the ski industry is built on and continues to be dependent on fossil fuels today. It’s so close to 100%, we might as well round to the nearest ten-thousandth to bump this up to the full 100%.
If you’re mad about this claim, stick with me - you’re my target audience. If you’re fuming, read all the way to the end.
Let’s also get a little more precise about what kinds of fossil fuels we’re talking about and where they’re utilized. In the interior Western states, coal and natural gas power your ski lifts and heat your lodges. Some of those even run on diesel, which is a petroleum distillate. Petroleum powers your car, shuttles, and busses to get from your house to the resort’s parking lot. Every single piece of gear you wear at a ski resort, with very few exceptions, is 100% petroleum-based. Every single piece of polyester, nylon, elastic, olefin, and synthetic fiber and material you’re wearing is a petroleum product.
Except goose down, that is, but wearing down at a ski resort is like wearing rock climbing shoes to the bar (heavy on the poser sheik) - total misuse of the materials and equipment.
Sure, there might be some of the richie-riches3 stumbling around in their injection-molded plastic ski boots wearing some partially wool-based under garments or glove liners or socks … but let’s get real, that’s only a tiny percentage by volume, weight, and area that is a non-petroleum-based material. Funny story, the dyes used for the wool were also likely petroleum based. The polyester blended, elastic-embedded wool products are also made entirely desirable by their integration of petroleum-based fibers with the so-called natural ones.
Back to the boots. The injection-molded plastic boots that often have metal or other plastic stays embedded, hinges, rubbers, and adhesives – all 100% petroleum, zero percent recyclable.
I can keep going, but I don’t want to bore you. The key takeaway here is that every single element of your ski experience is made entirely possible by petroleum and other carbon-based fuels and materials.
I know, you’ve seen the signs that some of the resorts are now powering their lifts with solar power. Funny, there aren’t any solar panels in the valley you’re in or on the roof of any of the lodges. Yep, that’s because the solar power is piped in via utility lines from afar, and there’s always some well lawyerized agreement that the buyer of solar or wind power gets to purchase their allocation of that power, despite it all going into the grid and the electrons really not caring where your virtuous dollars want them to go. But I get it, it’s about the symbolism and the investment.
Let’s add a margin of error to the claim that 100% of the ski industry is petroleum-made
I know there are minds out there who will find some microscopic counterargument to conflate to make it feel like skiing isn’t a petroleum sport.
They’ll say that it was the fossil fuel industrial complex that made us all dependent. They’ll say that the wood core in their fancy Swiss skis is proof that the claim of 100% of the ski industry being built on mined materials is wrong.
So, let’s just compromise and say that there’s a range here – and that range, including the occasional wood-cored skis, your occasional wool-based base layer, and the occasional EV-driving skier, accounts for a total of about 0.1% of the whole scene. I’ll give you that – we’re down to 99.9% of the entire ski experience being entirely made possible by and dependent on petroleum. Happy now? I still bet it’s nearer to 99.99% … the wood in those fancy skis wasn’t harvested, dried, and processed with love and fairy dust.
If you can prove me wrong, feel free. I’m open to being wrong and will change my mind. Let’s say that my numbers have a +/- 5% margin of error to give some breathing room to where I become “wrong.” I’ll hear it and I’ll change my mind if I am wrong.
Skiing is the most petroleum-dependent sport in the outdoor scene
When you look at every single piece of technology, fuel, equipment, transit, and comfort-creating space that makes skiing possible, it’s all fossil fuels and petroleum products. And it’s not just a little here and there – it’s every single dimension of the ski experience. Especially of the ski experience where you go to a ski resort (or area) where there’s a ski lift to carry thousands of people to the top of a mountain all day, every day, and where there are lodges to handle the tens of thousands of people, and so on.
If you think about the environments that ski resorts are in, they’re always typically colder places, higher in elevation, and that can remain permanently frozen. In the interior Western states, ski resorts are often placed in valleys where temperatures get wicked cold at night, often dropping into the range of -30F to record lows in the range of -60F.
To keep equipment running, water for all of the tourists flowing, and the lodges at a toasty 78F to keep the tourists from going hypothermic, the amount of heating fuels needed is disproportionate to any other recreation industry in any other place on the planet.
Accounting for the whole experience, skiing might just be the most energy intensive sport per-capita user, perhaps even besting cruise ships. It definitely bests the so-called “powersports” on count of the power sports not having huge warming, feeding, and shopping infrastructure as required amenities. Big claim, I know …
The plastics of your skis are made of petroleum distillates. The waxes for the base are, too. The helmets, gloves, jackets, pants, liners, boots, bindings, cords, cinch cords, toggles, goggles … all are 100% made of petroleum byproducts, or in the case of the metal parts, the mining, smelting, and formation of them were dependent on fossil fuels.
From the drive to the resort, to the lodges where you warm and put on your ski costume, to all of the gear, to the transit of all of the fuels and energy, and the food you consumed at the resort … the entire ski experience is made with fossil fuels. Skiing truly is a fossil fuel sport.
There are a few exceptions in the world of skiing that can marginally reduce the usage of fossil fuels, like not going to a resort, which most users wouldn’t give up, because the only other ways to ski require intensive skills, exertion, and risk — and most people just won’t do that. Your average and above average tourists going where there is no lodge, no ski patrol to help them with their booboo, no après ski parties … not a chance.
Clearly, if you’re worried about anything regarding carbonization of the atmosphere, big oil, or climate change, downhill / resort skiing is the biggest most gargantuan offender to your own position. Let’s be real; There is no possible way to rationally believe that you can ski at ski resorts AND be politically volatilized against fossil fuels and climate change … that would be like believing that you firmly believe in animal welfare, but your favorite food is cheap pork hot dogs wrapped in bacon.
If this rattles your amygdala a little bit, the cause is cognitive dissonance – you have two thoughts in your head that are in direct conflict and cannot coexist in a rational framework.
Resort skiing is perhaps the most fossil fuel and petroleum-dependent sports on Planet Earth, and that fact is extremely well and methodically obscured from view from most resort users.
It’s all thanks to the ski resort industrial complex
Ski resorts are sometimes called ski areas. Areas to me sounds much more “natural”. You know, you go to an area that just happens to be skiable. Well, that’s a myth. There’s no difference between a ski resort and a ski area anymore – both the same thing today, especially in places like California, Colorado, and Utah where all the ski resorts have been acquired by big corporations.
It wasn’t always that black and white. There used to be ski areas that weren’t corporatized like they are today, and then there were ski resorts that were a little more corporate. The bleed across the West that converted most of our ski areas into corporatized resorts is one that’s still occurring today.
In Colorado, which is synonymous with downhill skiing, our resorts weren’t run by advanced corporations until relatively recently. Funny, because skiing here used to be fun, and used to be a way to make use of mountainous areas that most people couldn’t even imagine accessing between the months of November and May without infrastructure, so the locals created a pastime out of the hills. Then, shit hit the fan.
Shit hit the fan in Colorado and the interior West when it was put on the map as a destination. Sometime in the late 1970s, Colorado made it onto the nation’s and the world’s map as a place to go skiing4.
The price of lift tickets started to point themselves upward toward the sky, which started shedding many locals off the mountains. First, from $2.50 per ticket to $5, then to 15, then to 25, then to 50, and now … $225 per lift ticket, per day.
Even adjusting for inflation, the rise in costs is astronomical. Could a day of skiing in Colorado for a family of four really add up to $1,000 just for the lift tickets alone? Yes, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Fast forwarding to the point, the current state of the ski industry has been an avalanche gaining energy for some time. With more interest, more potential skiers, more ski gear sold, and more cachet associated with the activity, the price rises to meet the willingness-to-pay of most users. And with the advanced corporations buying up and running all of our resorts now, the price is optimized to maximize revenue by hitting that sweet spot where number of users and price of the lift ticket cross paths.
Given the huge dollar amounts to be earned off of skiing in the interior West today, the conversion from Ma-n-Pop to mega corporations like Vail Resorts, Alterra Mountain Company, Mountain Capital Partners, and so on, is entirely a natural evolution of the once locally run industry to a mega industrial complex complete with public relations to shape perception.
With all of that revenue comes power. Lord knows the lease prices the West’s ski resorts are paying the Federal government for the land is not even a drop in the bucket. The land is basically free in the grand scheme, and the clear-cutting of the forests for the runs is very likely subsidized, too. Taxpayer subsidies to help that bottom line for shareholders.
Ski resorts, climate change, and control of public perception
One of the straws that broke this camel’s back was an email blast from an organization called, “Protect Our Winters” - branded as, “POW.” Because, you know, you get pow when you go skiing … get it? Moving on.
In this POW email blast, it finally clicked that it was time for a big tearing down of the green curtain that the Wizard of the Ski Industrial Complex continues to curate with their exceptional wealth and power. Here are the sentences that caused it all to slide:
“During questions, Senator Kennedy (R-LA) chose to focus on political theater and personal attacks on witnesses instead of addressing the greatest challenge facing our planet. Senator Kennedy, who receives substantial contributions from the oil and gas industry, did not attend the full hearing […] We stand for athletes like Gus, who at 23 years old, flew from his final World Cup race in Sweden to testify on the changes he sees from spending most of his life training on snow.”
(Source: “Defending Climate Action Amid Senate Circus,” Erin Sprague, 26-March-2024, info@protectourwinters.org. Email.)
If you think about what they’ve said here in context of the entire system that comprises skiing, it’s worthy of notice that this POW organization uses a Senator’s receipt of funding from oil and gas industries, as if it’s counter to their moral and ethical compass. It seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle a coal-like color, as if charred …
If the rub isn’t creating smoke for you yet, organizations like POW are running interference for the entire ski resort industry. They’re using false narratives, biased information, and intentional obfuscations to bias public perception about their industry’s relation to petroleum and other fossil fuels. Hilariously, they’re doing it right in front of all of us, and their messaging wizardry is so good that very few connect the dots and notice the extremely obvious flimflam.
Naturevirtue5 appears to be a potent modifier of public perception, which intentionally obfuscates the fact that the entire basis of the ski industry is petroleum and other fossil fuels.
Another interesting detail about POW is that they were out of Pacific Palisades, California, which is a little elite cove right in between Santa Monica and Malibu, then they moved to Boulder, Colorado, finding that colony to be complete, familiar, and ready for their arrival thanks to their scouts who went ahead and economically levered out those pesky local-yocals ahead of their arrival.6
Organizations like POW appear to play dirty politics, ethics, and misinformation. They call out donations to a political candidate from oil and gas companies, using that to maintain the obfuscation that their entire industry doesn’t just get little donations from the fossil fuel industry; Their entire industry is made entirely possible by the mining and carbon fuels industry.
So, the ski industry doesn’t get donations from petroleum and fossil fuels – it is an industry entirely made by and with fossil fuels.
There is widespread intellectual corruption and cognitive dissonance when it comes to skiing
Those at POW and the ski corporations would probably say that it’s an injustice that the ski industry has become dependent on petroleum and fossil fuels, and they would say that it’s an incidental, accidental, or necessary evil. Well, I guess they’re free to say that, just like O.J. was free to say that the glove didn’t fit, but the proof is in the punch here – and it smells like a big pile of intentionally obfuscated profit.
The intellectual corruption is spread throughout the ski industry, the outdoor industrial complex, users, and so-called NPOs, like Protect Our Winters, POW — and is fully spread to resort users. Those taking a position against the industry their entire sport and experience was made possible by is not intellectually viable. It’s a two-faced maneuver that puts them somewhere north of Sith, somewhere south of Thanos. Pardon the Star Wars and Avengers references.
I speculate that some of POWs funding comes from ski resorts - donations from ski resort corporations. That suggests an allegiance and relationship between the two. If so, then POW is part of a collusion that has formed between the ski industry and this organization to help further the message that fossil fuels, petroleum, and Other people are responsible for climate change and harming the ski industry, not the ski industry and skiers themselves. Even if I’m wrong about there being a financial relationship, it still doesn’t change the overall effect and system at work.
Did you notice the last sentence I referenced from the flimflam email from Erin Sprague of POW; How Erin (or writer) mentioned how their athletes are flying all over the globe to talk about climate change harming winters for their sport?
It’s interesting to see these kinds of clues left in plain sight, and the fact that these clues are intended entirely for their audience who is already experiencing unfettered groupthink to allow their false narrative to continue propagating without resistance. Like, are they flying all over the globe on a winged unicorn, or in a jet that burns five gallons of jet fuel per mile traveled?7
Organizations like POW are acting as linebackers for the ski resorts, who are running a game against the rest of us. ‘If we attack petroleum and oil and gas, people will think we’re the good guy; We’re against climate change and the carbon-based fuels industry!’ Hell, maybe they even believe they are and just don’t know?
The only way someone can believe that the ski industry and the fossil fuel industry are at odds is if:
They are unaware of how intertwined the ski industry and fossil fuel industries are
They are kind of aware, but are intentionally ignoring it, because skiing is just so fun and that topic is just too depressing and complex to research
They are definitely aware, and are knowingly holding the line to help keep the pow ‘a flowin’ and the stoke ‘a burnin’! Just gotta get those poor people to stop driving cars to Protect Our Winters, amiright?!
It appears POW and the ski resort industry know their base, though. I bet their market studies have the psychology nailed to the last personality trait and how many outdoor gear brand stickers are on the rear side windows of their cars. It’s wild to observe such widespread, cult-like delusion and self-illusion.
Ski resorts are one of the most taxpayer-subsidized, externality-generating industries in existence today
Dissonance about fuels, materials, and the ski experience are one component, but the other is an iceberg much too large for this one write-up. The ski industry in Colorado is one of the most heavily taxpayer-subsidized industries in our state.
The road maintenance needed to convey people from Denver, Denver International Airport (DIA), and from all over the state, country, and world just to ski is unfathomably expensive and environmentally fraught.
The road that links to most our ski resorts is I-70, which is nothing shy of an engineering marvel. It runs from the plains at 4,000 feet above sea level up to around 11,000 feet above sea level. Between 4,000 feet and 11,000 feet, there can be regular daily temperature differences of ~60F and more, given it can be 70 and sunny on the plains, and 25F and snowing at the Eisenhower Tunnel. The distance from the airport to one of our most basic ski resorts is on the order of 100 miles, one way.
The amount of snow plowing and salt needed is out of this world. Guess who pays for plowing and salt? Taxpayers from all over Colorado. And, sure, the ski resorts pay some taxes, too, but their tax dollars don’t scratch the surface of what’s needed to fund road maintenance to keep their lifts populated and money flowing.
If you cut out all of the tax revenue from residents of Colorado and only left the ski resorts to pay taxes for road care, maintenance of I-70 and to the resorts would stop immediately. The highways and highway maintenance and plowing operations in the ski corridors are disproportionately funded by Colorado residents than by the tax revenues coming off ski resorts.
Ski resorts are heavily subsidized by Colorado taxpayers, despite few Colorado taxpayers receiving any positive benefit from the ski resorts. Most of us got booted out of the ski resorts decades ago on cost alone and won’t go back, yet we pay for the abomination of maintaining the roads to get there.
Then, for those who think of Colorado water being clean, consider also that a car running in a cold, wet, snowy environment is a car with exhaust immediately trapped by precipitation and carried to the ground and into our waterways. Multiply this by the millions of people who travel here to ski every year. Interesting that nobody in the ski industry ever talks about the extra pollution from the transit just to get them to the ski resorts? Do the math on it — it’s bonkers.
Furthermore, when CDOT is plowing roads in Colorado around the ski resorts, they’re also salting the ever living hell out of the roads to keep them liquid for all of the visitors with little to no snow driving experience and with inadequate tires for the conditions. All of that salt goes directly into our water systems and rivers, despite our water being some of the most valuable in the country from a freshness and scarcity standpoint. Another vital detail you never hear mentioned by those supporting the ski industry.
The ski resort industry is the direct recipient of immense tax subsidies, both on a national and local scale. The highways built to ski resorts are wildly complex and expensive. Maintenance and plowing operations are extremely expensive, and are entirely funded by a tax burden that is disproportionately funded by state residents. That, and the added pollutants in these sensitive environments is an externality8 that the ski resort industry is able to brush under the rug in their incredibly successful mass fleecing.
It appears that the entire ski resort and outdoor industry that serves it is the site of unrecognized externalities that go far deeper than just car exhaust bubbling into the mountain air and road salt in our fresh river water. The fact that the mass public appears to have fallen for the obfuscation of the ski industry’s position in the grander scheme is glaring.
There’s so much more, but let’s boil this down
I think it’s pretty clear, I’m making the claim that the ski resort industry is entirely made possible and is also entirely dependent on petroleum and fossil fuels for their existence.
I’m also making the claim that the entire experience of skiing is made possible by multiple fossil fuels. And I’m definitely not saying the dependency was subversively achieved by the fossil fuel industry, I’m saying that it is entirely impossible for the ski industry to be what it is today without fossil fuels and petroleum-based products. That claim is extremely easily proven, to the point that I would do it in court if I had the chance.
Everything from the skis to the gear to the lodge to the lift are all entirely made possible by petroleum and fossil fuels. That entangles the experience of the skier as also being made possible by these things.
The purpose of the analysis and this treatise is to expose deep, intentional, and pernicious misinformation flowing outward from the ski industry and all of their information interference runners, such as POW. And it’s not just POW running the interference, it’s the outdoor industrial complex that makes all of this gear out of petroleum distillates then sits idly by while the other gladiators duke it out. They just happen to have the premium box at the colosseum to watch the fight at a safe distance …
The wildest thing about all of this is that so many people are entangled in this extremely intricate and expensive fleecing of the public about the position of skiing and ski resorts as a Naturevirtue-approved activity that brings people into Nature and the great outdoors.
The most fascinating bit is how unbelievably well obfuscated and distorted that perception is. I have multiple friends who post pictures of themselves at ski resorts on social media, who also believe they are staunchly against fossil fuel providers, and deeply and politically oppose the climate from changing – and their words in their post are always, “I needed this great day out in nature!” No joke, nature at a ski resort … laugh-out-loud, right? ‘We bombed Nature with military-grade munitions this morning to keep you safe from nature’s avalanches, you’re welcome …’
There is so much more to say on this subject because it is such a big topic. The dissonance being curated by the ski and outdoor industry to obfuscate the relationship between skiing and carbon-based fuels and materials is perhaps one of the greatest misinformation campaigns of the last 40 years.
The ski resort and equipment industry is perhaps one of the most heavily subsidized industries in existence. The ski resort industry is also the site of some of the most substantial and unrecognized externalities in modern industries since the early days of the industrial revolution. Not recognizing the wolf in sheep’s’ clothes is a sign of how hilariously well curated their campaigns have worked with cult-like efficacy.
Interestingly, my family abandoned ski resorts in the early 1970s due to rising costs, and rising numbers of crappy people arriving at resorts and ruining the experience (Mad Lib it, “T_x___ in jeans.”). Yet, I have not experienced more than a couple winters where I haven’t skied. Ski resorts and the entire industry has turned to dirty politics, corrupted narratives, misinformation campaigns, and interference runners to obfuscate their position as being an industry built entirely in the house of the mining, oil, and gas industries.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner embedded with generations of stories and experiences with the West’s loss of the ski industry to corporate interests and greedy, careless tourists.
Footnotes and Citations
Après ski — A French word meaning, “after ski” used by American resort skiers to indicate they’re done skiing and will now drink expensive booze and eat expensive food at the lodge or restaurant at the base of the mountain. A repulsive poser pretension.
Yep, this post is a sequel - I’ve done this before. Check out the summer version of this post:
Let’s be honest, none of these people would be doing this if it weren’t for its fashion catchet right now. More about that here:
I wonder if there’s a connection between ski resorts and other companies selling out the West for profit …
Naturevirtue - I took these words and slammed them together, because it’s a thing. Someday, I’ll write it up for the academic black market so it all makes sense. Basically the belief that your experience in nature is virtuous, and when you show it off to everyone else, it’s Naturevirtue.
Yes, they levered out those pesky locals …
A Boeing 747 consumes about five gallons of fuel per mile traveled. And, sure, that might come to 100 miles per gallon per person on the plane, but the carbon footprint of airline travel is still disproportionate to lowly ground-dwellers and laborers … (https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/question192.htm)
Externality - An action that affects other people without being accounted for in costs of the good or service. An example would be the high costs of maintaining I-70 for skiers at the cost of those Colorado taxpayers who do not go skiing.
What percentage of down time do all the "flatlanders" (in quotes, as I'm one as well) spend recovering from altitude sickness? Friends have told me if they don't take their meds soon enough, it can ruin an (expensive) day or two.
Have you heard of Tuckerman Ravine? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckerman_Ravine ) Thought that might cheer you up to know that a no-lift place still exists!
Also, yeah, synthetics. Even if one wants to wear more wool -- and it is possible to find merino base layers, well-fitting socks, and make one's own intermediate layers -- well, sheep. Sheep graze. So wool is arguably not that environmental either.