Northeast skiers just haven’t been able to catch a break the last couple of years. During the dry 2022-23 season, meager snowfall delayed openings at ski areas across the region and even forced Vermont’s Mad River Glen to for a while in the heart of the ski season. This winter got off to a much stronger start, with cold temperatures making it possible for resorts to start snowmaking and lay a base for in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

This week, New England’s early season bounty is being literally washed away by heavy rainfall and severe flooding. A number of , including Sunday River, Smugglers Notch, and Sugarloaf, had to suspend operations. Jay Peak Resort in Vermont, which is sometimes spared the weather woes that affect the broader region thanks to a , posted on social media on December 18 that lifts were closed, saying even they “could not escape this sloppy sogfest.”

 

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Of course, Monday’s storm that extended far beyond the ski hills on the east coast. At least by rising water and falling trees when 2-4 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, and many communities will spend the coming months repairing the floodwaters’ destruction.

Andrew Drummond just sent me this video of Jackson Falls, NH

Wtf

— The Out of Collective (@outofpodcast)

Even after fresh flakes replace the snow swept away in the deluge, some ski areas will continue to feel the impact of Monday’s storm. It before power is restored everywhere in the region, and it will take time to rebuild the infrastructure damaged by flooding (like this destroyed road to Sugarbush).

Sunday River closed with people stranded due to flooding. Sugarloaf closed as well, and this is the road that leads to it. So tough to see heading into peak ski season
Credit: Carrabassett Valley PD

— Christian Bridges (@ChristianWGME)

The rain has already eased off in most of New England, and slightly colder temperatures are in for later this week. Longer term, there’s probably more wet weather in store for the northeast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association predicts that this winter will be rainier than usual, with the possibility of more short, intense storms.

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British army officer, 32, has completed her expedition to reach the South Pole solo on skis.

Chandi, who is of Indian descent and Sikh faith, reached the earth’s southernmost point on January 3, completing the 700 miles from Hercules Inlet in just 40 days. She set off on the adventure on November 24, pulling her belongings and food in a sled that weighed 192 pounds.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYOa8LeDAd2/

Documenting her journey via voice recordings, Chandi said that “it feels so surreal” to have finally completed her trek.

“I made it to the South Pole, where it’s snowing,” Chandi said on January 3. “Feeling so many emotions right now.”

The expedition was meant to inspire others to push their boundaries, regardless of their ethnicity or background, said Chandi. While other women have completed solo expeditions in Antarctica—Brit crossed the continent in 2018—she believes she is to do so.

Chandi battled whiteout conditions and windblown sastrugi throughout her endeavor, and her audio updates described Antarctica’s extreme climate, as well as her own daily struggles. She slept very little due to the cold and winds, even though she made faster progress than she anticipated. In each update Chandi dedicated her daily progress to a friend or family member.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYRWFMcD94T/

Her trek was also a to create an annual adventure grant for women.

“No matter where you are from, where your start line is, everybody starts somewhere,” Chandi said in her most recent voice recording. “I don’t want to just break the glass ceiling, I want to smash it into a million pieces. Who’s with me?”

Climbers Lost in 2021

Our colleagues at Climbing for 31 members of the international climbing community who died last year. They ranged in age from 21 to 91, and while some succumbed to old age or COVID-19, others perished while pursuing the activity they loved.

One of those profiled is Californian, 28, who was a mainstay of Arizona’s rock-climbing community as well as a skilled alpinist who marked first ascents in Peru, Alaska, and California. Just ten days before her death, Field and her husband, Derek, completed a rare ascent of 18,504-foot Destornillador’s southwest ridge, in Peru’s Cordillera Carabaya. She died in a rappelling accident on July 14 after notching the first ascent of a previously unnamed rock tower that she and her husband named Kawri Orcco, which in Quechua means “monster peak.”

Dropping In

Get pumped for powder by watching freeskier hit this line in Lyngen, Norway.��

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Nepali climber Gelje Sherpa, 29, is proceeding with a wintertime ascent of 26,864-foot Cho Oyu, which straddles the China-Nepal border.

While most expeditions on the mountain start in Tibet, Gelje will attempt to scale it without crossing into Chinese territory by following a more challenging route on the southeastern Nepalese face. The mountaineer hopes that this route will be used by future commercial expeditions.

“We believe in us, we dream CHO OYU route from Nepal and we will set commercial route to the summit from Nepal,” Gelje . “Even we are miles away from our targeted amount in fundraising of GOFUNDME but CHO OYU Nepal team really want to thank each and every 182 donors who believed us.”

The expedition will kick off on January 20. Gelje will lead a team of 14, nine of whom will ascend the mountain. The attempt is part of his project to become the youngest person to scale the world’s 14 peaks above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet). That record is currently held by Mingma Gyabu “David” Sherpa of Nepal, who completed the challenge in 2019 at age 30 years and five months. Both David Sherpa and Gelje Sherpa worked as crew members on Nirmal Purja’s record-setting project that year to scale the 14 mountains in just six months.

A successful ascent could help mountaineers sidestep access problems on the mountain. China currently maintains stiff border restrictions due to COVID-19, and the mountaineering site reports that the country is likely to forbid foreign climbers from crossing its borders in 2022. Mountaineers faced permitting challenges prior to the pandemic, and in 2019 China raised the fee for climbing Cho Oyu from $7,400 to $9,300.

Cho Oyu is world’s sixth-highest peak, and for years it was considered one of the easiest to climb above 8,000 meters. But that reputation is tied to the Chinese route.

Summiting the mountain from Nepal presents a greater challenge, due to the technical nature of the route. The first ascent of Cho Oyu from Nepal, and since then people have reached the peak from that side.

While the Nepal Mountaineering Association has funded other expeditions on Cho Oyu, Gelje said from the NMA for this expedition and is instead covering costs via a GoFundMe page and personal loans.

“It would be great if I could get part of that budget, but I don’t expect it, which is why I’m willing to take personal loans from banks to fulfill my lifelong dream,” he.��

Aspen Businesses Hungry for Labor

Yet another ski town is hungry for workers.��

A recent report in the lists 1,027 job openings in Colorado’s Pitkin County (population 17,700), home to Aspen and Snowmass Village. According to the state’s Department of Labor, the majority of those vacancies are in the service industry, with 556 job openings in customer service and 168 in host/hostessing. Resort operator Aspen Snowmass had the most job openings, with 164.

According to Jeff Hanle, the company’s director of communications, the ski resort’s employees “worked their butts off” to keep things running during the busy holiday season.

“I don’t know how many people were working on the front line, but pretty much no one was going to the office during the holidays,” Hanle told the Times. “We had executive teams trained on the lifts.”

Like other ski towns, Aspen’s shortage of workers in part to a housing crisis driven by the pandemic. In December the resort created an to rent to employees. The city also for new short-term rentals and suspended new home construction in an attempt to address its lack of affordable housing.

Coming in Muddy

A muddy cyclocross race in Gullegem, Belgium, saw one rider crash, slide under the barriers, and impact another racer on Tuesday.

Is there a VAR in cyclocross?

— Cyclocross24.com (@cyclocross24)

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The outdoor world produced plenty of headlines over the holidays—here’s a quick look at some of the stories you may have missed:

Crews rescued stranded tram workers: Rescue crews in New Mexico who were stranded for 15 hours on the Sandia Peak Aerial Tramway on New Year’s Eve after part of the cable iced over during a storm.

Alberto Salazar lost his final appeal: The distance-running coach is now officially banned for life from participating in any activity organized by or under the auspices of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee after to the U.S. Center for SafeSport on charges of sexual misconduct.

The Marshall Fire destroyed more than 900 homes: A outside Boulder, Colorado, burned nearly 1,000 homes in the suburban towns of Superior, Louisville, and Marshall on December 30.

A hiker died in the Grand Canyon: On December 22, crews at the national park of Ralph Stoll, 57, of Scottsdale, Arizona, who had gone missing while hiking the previous day.

An avalanche killed a backcountry skier: Colorado saw its of the 2021–22 ski season on December 25 when a backcountry skier was killed in a slide near Cameron Peak just west of Fort Collins.

Mikaela Shiffrin battled COVID-19: The American ski phenom races in Lienz, Austria, on December 27 and 28 after testing positive for COVID-19. Shiffrin will return to competition on January 4.

A surfer was killed by a great white shark: Tomas Butterfield, 42, of Sacramento died on Christmas Eve after while bodyboarding in Morro Bay, California.��

A man died during a cliffside collapse in southern Australia: The incident near Bells Beach, one of the country’s most famous surf spots,.

Worker Shortage Hampers Vail Resorts

The worker shortage affecting ski towns across the country prevented Vail Resorts from opening terrain—despite plenty of snowfall—at its Colorado ski areas during the busy holiday period. That’s the thrust of ��recent report in the Colorado Sun, which��explains how the labor shortage also resulted in overcrowding and limited food service and retail sales at Breckenridge, Keystone, Crested Butte, and other Vail-owned ski areas at the end of December.��

One anonymous ski patroller at Breckenridge told the Sun how a lack of lift operators and snowcat drivers was to blame for the fact that more terrain wasn’t open. On December 30, Beth Howard, chief operating officer of Vail Mountain, attributed the terrain closures to the recent uptick in employees with COVID-19,.

“Our mountain is staffed and our employees are vaccinated, but in an effort to keep you safe we are asking any employee who is sick or has been exposed to COVID-19 to stay home–and they are,” Howard wrote. “As a result of these COVID exclusions, our operation has been impacted.”

Vail, of course, is not alone. The Sun story also echoes other reports of how a nationwide housing crisis is proving detrimental to workers in Lake Tahoe, Jackson Hole, and other western ski areas.

Merry Cragsmas

Climber Adam Ondra recently completed a first ascent of Kout Pikle 9a+, a punishing 5.15a route in the Czech Republic.

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It may be the end of an era for U.S. professional bicycle racing.

On December 22, Medalist Sports —the nation’s longest-running road-bike stage race solely for professional cyclists—after it was unable to find a sponsor to pay for the event in 2022. Organizers had canceled it in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic but were hoping to revive it.��

The seven-day race, which began in 2000, was classified by Union Cycliste International, the sport’s governing body, as 2.Pro, which meant that only professional riders were eligible to compete. Throughout its , the Tour of Utah became a proving ground for up-and-coming American cyclists, as it was a rare opportunity for them to race against stars from the Tour de France.

After the, the Tour of Utah became the country’s only multiday stage race for male professional racers. Now only one of these races remains: the women’s-only Colorado Classic (which has not operated since 2019, though organizers are trying to revive it for 2022).��

The Tour of Utah was also one of the last remaining U.S. cycling events to operate under the decades-old business model for international multiday pro bicycle races. It was financed by the Larry H. Miller family, which owns a successful chain of car dealerships in Utah, Arizona, California, and Colorado. Races like the Tour of Utah have soaring operational expenses and are traditionally financed by major cash sponsorships or government backing. Sponsors then rely on television exposure and media impressions to offset the cost.��

This ��model dates back more than 40 years in the U.S. In 1979, organizers of Colorado’s regional Red Zinger Bicycle Classic sold a title sponsorship to the Coors Brewing Company, and the deal grew the race into one of the largest in the world. The Coors Classic ran from 1980 until 1989, and its ability to attract star riders from Europe prompted other cycling promoters to create others like it.��In 1989, businessman Donald Trump sponsored the Tour de Trump, later renamed the Tour DuPont, which ran until 1996. The Tour de Georgia, held from 2003 until 2008, was financed by the state’s department of economic development. The Tour of Missouri, which ran from 2007 until 2009, was backed by that state’s tourism board. The, which ran from 2006 until 2019, was sponsored by pharmaceutical company Amgen and billionaire Philip Anschutz. And Colorado’s USA Pro Challenge, which ran from 2011 through 2015, was backed by the family of Richard E. Schaden, founder of the restaurant chain Quiznos.

The�� was a clear��sign that this system was no longer working. American television audiences for pro cycling are steadily declining, and fewer companies are willing to fund multiday races. The Tour of Utah’s abandonment could be the nail in the coffin.��

But there is still hope for cycling in the U.S., with new formats of competition��attracting attention and sponsorships. These days, major brands are backing mass-participant bike races that , such as the Leadville Trail 100 MTB and Unbound Grave.��

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can point out the where Mussolini gave speeches. He knows where to in Budapest, Hungary. And for more than 40 years, he has researched European travel for his popular guidebooks and, amassing a sizable fan base with his intricate knowledge of history, culture, and cuisine.

Prior to 2021, however, Steves had largely overlooked one major side of European travel: the great outdoors. That changed in September when Steves went on a six-day trek through the French Alps.

“Here I am, supposed to be this expert on European travel, and I’ve never done a multiday hike in the Alps,” Steves told ���ϳԹ��� in a recent phone interview. “It was something totally new to me, and now I want to tell everybody what a great travel option it is.”

Now 66, Steves has become hooked on hiking, and he’s convinced that his fans—many of whom are near or at retirement age—may enjoy trekking in the mountains just as much as cruising the Seine or.

“What I like is the rhythm of my feet on the trail,” Steves said. “It’s therapeutic. It’s a delightful experience for my body and my soul.”

Steves and three friends tackled part of the Tour du Mont Blanc, the famed 110-mile trail network around Europe’s highest peak. The well-trodden route passes multiple guesthouses, restaurants, and hotels, and there’s even a service that ferries a hiker’s bags from one destination to the next. But the route is also rocky and rugged, with more than 32,000 total feet of elevation gain.

The group hiked an abridged 60-mile route that started and finished in Chamonix, walking between eight and 12 miles each day, up and over mountain passes and down into valleys. Steves credited his stretching regimen and a pacing strategy with helping his body adapt to life on the trail. It also didn’t hurt that delicious French cuisine awaited him and his friends at their guesthouses at day’s end.

“It was kind of like glamping,” he said.

Choosing the Alps over Paris or London was no mistake—this trip was one of Steves’s rare personal vacations. An, he spends upward of 100 days annually in Europe researching his books, operating his tour program, and filming his show. After a year of pursuing his books and TV show amid the pandemic, Steves forced himself to take six days off.

“From a practical standpoint, in six days I could have updated my Helsinki and Holland chapters, or I could do all of Norway,” Steves said. “My trips aren’t vacations—I’m writing and researching and making TV shows.”

Steves blamed his workaholism for discovering hiking so late in his career. He published his first book on European travel in 1980 and launched his public television program, Travels in Europe with Rick Steves, in 1991. Since then he’s become the unofficial guide for entire generations of North American travelers, beloved for his earnest attitude and dad jeans.

Over the years Steves has seen adventure travel in Europe explode in popularity, but he didn’t write about hiking or biking trips because his expertise was in history and culture.

Yet travel to Europe is changing, and Steves has witnessed a change in his own audience. “People have done the sightseeing and the Eurail trips, and they want to do something more active,” he said. “Nobody wants to sit in an auditorium with other tourists anymore.”

Steves is also changing, and his newfound love of hiking may be the biggest shift. After his Mont Blanc trip, he recently became quite the gearhead, researching hiking equipment on the internet. He also created a bucket list for other long-distance treks, from trails in Italy’s Dolomites to the South West Coast Path in Cornwall, England.

In his eyes, the trails crisscrossing the continent are there for anyone to enjoy—no matter how old they are.

“If somebody has their act together and has been taking smart care of themselves, this is totally doable,” he said. “You don’t need to be Superman. Heck, I did it.”

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Adding to the we’re feeling this holiday season, The New York Times recently published a story on , a tool that records our planet’s ongoing climate crisis.��

Should all of human civilization someday be obliterated by climate change, this bus-size steel vault will archive critical information about the planet’s weather patterns and our catastrophic climate errors.

The Times compares it to the flight recorder of a plane that records the craft’s final moments before crashing so that investigators can determine what went wrong.

Earth’s Black Box will chronicle climate change through media hits and scientific reports. Every time something new is published or posted about climate change online—news articles, social media posts, academic journals, etc.—it will find the information via search terms and save it.

The box itself will be built in Tasmania, an island off mainland Australia’s southern coast. It will be climate-proof, with three-inch-thick steel walls, battery storage, and solar panels. Although developers anticipate it will be created by early 2022, hard drives that will be stored in it have already begun recording, starting with reports from the November COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

The purpose of this device, according to its website, is to “provide an unbiased account of the events that led to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations, and inspire urgent action.”

This isn’t the first doomsday reserve . The , is essentially a massive safety deposit containing a collection of earth’s agricultural biodiversity.

Earth’s Black Box is equal parts record-keeping vault and a creative statement to hold world leaders accountable for the action they do or don’t take against a climate apocalypse. Unlike the seed vault, this box is more than a practical contraption; it’s a warning to future humans. It seems to say, “Our descendants—if any survive—are watching how we screwed this up!” That is, if they can figure out how to get into it.

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Earlier this month, , outside Kalispell, Montana, became the 81st ski area added to the Indy Pass, a alternative to mega passes like Ikon and Epic.

The , which costs $329 (or $131 for kids), offers customers two days of skiing at each of the resorts under the Indy umbrella, which includes hills in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. Season-pass holders for these properties can add the Indy Pass for just $189 (which means you could get 160 days of skiing for less than the cost of a day ticket at Vail, Colorado.)

The Indy Pass was conceived of by Doug Fish, an Oregon-based owner of a marketing agency, and launched during the 2019–20 ski season. It has since .

The company prioritizes independently owned, small-to-midsize ski areas with a community- and family-oriented vibe, an increasingly rare commodity in the ski industry. You may have heard of some of the mountains on the list, such as Idaho’s Tamarack Resort, Powder Mountain in Utah, and Waterville Valley Resort in New Hampshire. Other ski areas may be off of your radar, like Little Switzerland in Slinger, Wisconsin, or Cataloochee Ski Area in Maggie Valley, North Carolina.��

A released this fall takes viewers to 12 of the beloved hills you can frequent with the pass, including Washington’s 49 Degrees North and Maine’s Saddleback Mountain. These are not huge resorts you get access to with the big passes; each is generally smaller and beckons with its own sense of charm—cozy lodges, creaky lifts, and cast of longtime locals.

When Blacktail announced its alliance with Indy, its Instagram post described it as joining “.” With skiing under pressure from climate change, mega passes, housing crises, and economic disparity, maybe a revolution is just what we need.

Montana Elk-Hunting Debate Raises Issues of Habitat Protection and Public- and Private-Land Access

Montana hunters are after the state’s fish and wildlife commission backed away from a plan to change elk-hunting rules.

Land management, as well as population management for hunted species, is complicated. In Montana, residents can buy an over-the-counter permit, unless they want to hunt a handful of highly desirable animal herds or in specific areas of the state. Those areas and herds, which can be found on both public and private land, require a lottery-based permit.

A recent proposal would have removed the need for a hunting permit on private lands and decreased the number of total available permits on the public lands. Opponents argued that this favors private landowners and wealthy visitors willing to pay to hunt. A recent article from does a fantastic job of laying it all out.

The denial of the proposal helps keep elk hunting in Montana accessible and affordable, prioritizing residents for permits to the most coveted hunts.

Flipping Out

Washington skier launches a scenic one in front of Mount Shuksan. Catch her and a crew of incredible skiers in the short film .

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The entrepreneur behind a believes his technology will provide a solution to traffic jams that occur along Colorado’s I-70 corridor during ski season. The highway offers access from the Denver metro area to many of the state’s most popular ski areas and is notorious for its extreme (and ) overcrowding on powder days.

French expat Erwin Germain created the new app, , to mimic similar ones he’s used to find carpooling options in Europe. The app vets and then matches drivers and riders heading between various destinations along the route for fixed fees. Rides are intentionally priced low (just below the Internal Revenue Service standard for business driving, at 56 cents per mile), with 16 percent of each fare going back to the company for processing and other expenses.

It’s just the latest proposed solution to the congestion caused by Colorado’s notorious ski traffic—and maybe the most affordable yet. But even carpoolers run the risk of getting ensnared in the terrible traffic heading up the mountain.��

Resorts and government entities have tried a variety of approaches to the commuting conundrum, too, from opening up extra toll lanes, to raising parking fees to encourage skiers and boarders to use other methods of transit. The problem with the latter approach is that public-transit options are slim and expensive: tickets for the train between Denver and Winter Park Resort, created in partnership with Amtrak, start at $29, and the bus, with service to four mountains, starts at $25 (and also gets stuck in traffic).

Treadshare seems promising—it has already been downloaded more than 700 times since its late-November launch. But in concept, the app is just another way for Colorado to put off investing in the solution everyone who’s been stuck in a five-hour ski-traffic jam has prayed for: reliable, high-speed, .

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Mikaela Shiffrin knows what’s coming.

In a little over a month she will step into the international spotlight as the American star of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, where she will race in all six alpine-skiing events for the first time in her career. Casual fans may see Shiffrin, 26, as a shoo-in to win multiple gold medals, but victory is hardly guaranteed. Shiffin has struggled on the 2021–22 World Cup circuit after a back injury derailed her early in the season. have appeared. And she will have more attention on her in Beijing than perhaps any other Olympic athlete.

We called Shiffrin to get some insight into how she’s approaching the Games.��

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���ϳԹ���: How did your early-season back problems impact your buildup for the Olympics?
Mikaela Shiffrin: In November my plan was to return home to Copper Mountain [in Colorado] and start training double and sometimes triple sessions to prepare for all of the events. Copper is where I do my glorious overtraining—it’s the place I would go to get everything in, and fix my skiing in every event, and get that repetition and proper training. Right off the bat I strained my back, and it took me out for pretty much the entire camp. This was supposed to be my most important training block in the buildup to the Olympics. This is where I’d fine-tune giant slalom and hammer some speed volume, and of course literally none of that happened. I feel very much that I’m not where I need to be from a preparation standpoint. I do feel very delayed and unsure about how these next weeks and months will go and how that will impact my plan in China. I’m optimistic that we can start to build back to each event and get the training in. But at this point, if this was a major checkpoint, I certainly feel behind.

How is the mental preparation for racing six Olympic events in 2022 different from racing five in 2018?
You have to be prepared to be exhausted. There’s a huge chance that the races will be postponed and then held back-to-back rather than having a recovery or training day between. We experienced those schedule changes in South Korea, so I know what it will look like. Still, it’s hard to prepare for something like that, where you have to be ready to race and then find out it’s been postponed. You wake up every day being ready to go on the mountain in race mode. Then, if it’s canceled, you have to be prepared to do it again the next day. It’s not as much physically hard as it is mentally and emotionally exhausting. I know how lofty a goal it is to race six events, and I’m not expecting that it will work. We will cross that bridge of whether I’m prepared to be a contender in the events that I ski, whether that’s all of the events or if I’m going to have to skip out.

Over the summer, gymnast Simone Biles opened up about her mental health amid the weight of Olympic expectations. I’m curious if her words had any impact on the way you approach competition.
I certainly followed the stories around Simone and how she was openly sharing her pressures and the anxiety she felt, even depression, and all of those mental health issues that come out with the insane amount of pressure that’s put on athletes, especially Olympians competing for gold. I could definitely relate to feeling, like, if you happen to wake up and feel awful, or if you’re having a bad day—and you cannot afford to have a bad day during the Games—you feel like you’re letting down your entire nation and that every single person at home is disappointed in you. It’s a really isolating and lonely feeling. You’re just one little person who is trying to compete in your sport and do the best you can, and sometimes it’s really terrifying.

I believe Biles called it the “twisties,” where you cannot tell up from down and you’re afraid you might hurt yourself.
We definitely get our form of the twisties, or vertigo. You don’t want to risk flying into the woods and breaking your back, or crashing and tumbling and blowing up your knee or breaking your femur. All of these things have happened, and they do happen. The risks in our sport are very real. We’re always aware of it. But when you get on this Olympic stage, all of a sudden people expect that you’re literally going to win or die trying. This is not healthy. You cannot sustain that mindset. The thing I’m trying to wrap my head around is that I know I’m going to feel that pressure. I’m going to feel some obligation to all of these people, who I don’t even know, to bring home gold so that they can be excited. I don’t want to disappoint them. That’s a huge piece of it, and I think it’s undeniably going to be part of it, whether I want to or not, no matter how stressful or uncomfortable that can be. I’m going to face it head-on. Most likely there are going to be a lot of athletes at the Olympics who feel pressure, anxiety, depression—I am going to be feeling it—and a lot of us are going to have success, and a lot of us will have the kind of failures that make you feel like you let your country down. It’s not particularly easy to swallow. I’d rather go in with an open mind about it.

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