Why ski areas don't belong in national parks

Why ski areas don’t belong in national parks

By Ben Gadd, 2006

Downhill skiing. Healthy outdoor fun, right?

Yes, it’s fun. You ride the lift up and you come swooping down. It’s a rush. You do it over and over, all day long.

But is it really healthy? Not if you get hurt at it, something I will touch on briefly a little further on. Nor is downhill skiing healthy for the places in which it is practiced. They get hurt, too. That’s mainly what I’m going to talk about here.

Suppose that you are a ski-area developer. Suppose that you wish to build a new ski area in the Alberta Rockies. Here’s what would happen to the place you pick for it—which could not be, for reasons that will become obvious—in one of the mountain national parks.

First you build a road into the wilds. Since the best definition of wilderness is “roadless area,” building that road means the end of that patch of wilderness. For this reason, building roads is no longer allowed in wilderness parts of Canadian national parks.
Then you cut down some of the forest to make the runs, the lift lines and the parking lots. This is logging, which is generally prohibited in national parks.
You bring in the bulldozers to make the landscape smoother, blasting outcrops and digging out boulders. You have to create flat places on the mountainside for parking lots. All this is landscape modification, which is also generally prohibited in national parks.
You install ski lifts. These require ugly metal towers and long spans of cables dotted with chairs and gondolas. Electrical power is brought in, requiring further forest-cutting along the powerline right-of-way, then the installation of poles and cable. This is all industrial-type visual pollution, which is not supposed to be visible in national parks.
You put up one or more large buildings—the ski lodge, maintenance facilities, equipment storage sheds, etc.—in what was once wilderness. This is no longer allowed in those parts of national parks still zoned as wilderness.
You bring in trucks, snow-cats, snowmobiles and other motorized equipment required to pack down the runs and keep the ski area going. Inevitably there are fuel spills, lubricant spills, antifreeze spills, hydraulic spills. None of this is allowed in national parks.
You open the gates and invite the skiers into your ski area. They come by the thousands every morning, filling the highways leading to the park and spreading exhaust that lingers in winter’s temperature inversions. This is air pollution, which isn’t supposed to be tolerated in national parks.
The public lines up at the ticket wickets and pays you money for the right to ride your lifts. You like this. You are inclined to want more skiers at those wickets, and more money from each of them. However, the profit motive is not part of the mandate of national parks.
Each morning you switch on the lifts, using electricity that, in most cases, comes from a power plant that burns coal. The burning produces carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warning. It also produces acidic sulphur compounds, tiny particles of ash, and other serious air pollutants. The national parks are supposed to be exemplary in reducing greenhouse gases and protecting the atmosphere.
Thousands of skiers and snow-boarders ride the lifts and head down the runs, moving fast, churning up the snow, making a lot of noise and generally ensuring that the ski area is human territory. Few wild creatures hang around for long. Nor are they inclined to cross the busy runs to get from one part of their range to another. Your ski area is now largely lost habitat, and it’s also a barrier to wildlife movement. Habitat loss and the imposition of barriers are not supposed to occur in national parks. Neither are people supposed to be concentrated in wilderness zones.
Of course, some species do just fine at your ski area. Ravens and coyotes, for example, scavenge food dropped and thrown away by the skiers. They are also very good at picking through the many discarded snack-food wrappers, drink containers and potato-chip bags they find blowing around the parking lots. These animals are attracted to the artificial feeding situation you have created, consuming calories that aren’t particularly good for them. They get into scrapes with people. For these reasons, feeding animals is not allowed in national parks. Neither is littering.
All those skiers and snowboarders have to go to the bathroom at least once during their day of fun on the slopes. Men and boys often urinate in the woods beside the runs, polluting them, while women and girls prefer to use the ski-lodge restrooms. Human waste is difficult to dispose of in the cold, high-mountain environment in which the ski area is built. As a result, the watershed below the ski area becomes polluted with sewage. This is unlawful everywhere in Canada.
People get hurt at your ski area. They break their legs; they break their wrists; they run into trees; they run into each other—especially on the weekends, when the slopes are crowded and the accident rate goes up. The government is publicly concerned about this, so it has set a carrying capacity for each national-park ski area, beyond which more skiers are not supposed to be allowed on the runs. But you, like other ski area operators in the parks, routinely ignore these limits. The government does nothing about it. Nor does it really seem to care how many times a day the ambulance heads up to the ski area, each delivery to hospital running up the medical and socioeconomic costs of this sport.
You aren’t content to put up with vagaries of the weather, and you want to open earlier in the season than nature would otherwise dictate, so you make artificial snow. You take water from streams that are already low in the winter, endangering aquatic life. This is against the law anywhere in Canada. You dig trenches and lay pipes and hoses to carry the water to the slopes—more disturbance—and you build concrete platforms for snow-making “guns” that roar so loudly you can’t make yourself heard within 30 m of them. This is noise pollution, which is not supposed to happen in national parks.
Your employees operate special machines that pack down the snow, flattening the fragile layer at the base. The thousands of small rodents that would otherwise live in that layer all winter are unable to do so. Fewer rodents means fewer weasels to eat them, fewer owls to eat the weasels, and so on. You are further wrecking wildlife habitat and impoverishing the area’s ecosystem. Harming ecological integrity is not allowed in national parks.
Sometimes nature provides too much snow, and then you have the risk of avalanches killing your patrons. So you make the snow slide at times when no skiers are present. You do this by blasting the slopes with explosives, often fired from military artillery. The noise is even louder than the snow-making guns, so it carries for many kilometres, upsetting wildlife and humans alike. The surfaces where the shells hit are damaged, and fragments of exploded charges litter the area. All of this is completely out of character with what national parks are supposed to do: protect landscapes and give wild animals secure homes. One can safely assume that back-country dynamiting and canon-firing are ticketable offences in national parks.
At the end of the day, when the lifts are shut down, most of the skiers leave at about the same time. They clog the roads leading from your ski area. The skiers are tired. Night comes early in the skiing months, and the roads are often slippery. This is an evil combination. It produces nasty accidents. Traffic congestion and highway fatalities are not appropriate activities in a national park.
The national park needs the money that skiing generates and needs it badly because the agency is grossly underfunded. So the MP who runs Parks Canada makes a point of telling all and sundry that downhill skiing is considered appropriate in national parks, and that, to quote from a current Parks Canada document on ski areas, they “add to the visitor experience by providing a popular winter activity, which is the cornerstone of winter tourism in mountain national parks and contributes to their unique cultural heritage."

Downhill skiing as “cultural heritage”? I don’t think so.

              Uphill skiing can lay claim here. Skiers who head into the back-country under their own steam, and I am one of them, are inheritors of an adventurous mountain culture that has been passed along in the Canadian Rockies since the 1930s. It is all about humans feeling small and humble as they cross huge icefields; it is about crevasses and camaraderie and whiteouts and long ascents with a pack on your back, your lungs full of clean mountain air and your heart singing amid the unbelievable beauty around you.

              For the downhill crowd, skiing is about speed and style and little else—except everything in points one through eighteen above. If this is culture, it sure ain’t a heritage the national parks should be proud of.



              Obviously, the federal government should never have allowed downhill skiing to get started in the mountain parks. Like trail-motorcycling, like snowmobiling, like road-building, logging, mining, and a host of other wilderness-wrecking activities that started small and got out of control before they were stopped, mechanized skiing should have ended in the parks long ago.

              ***

I say “generally” because as we are seeing more and more logging in the mountain parks. Carried out by Parks Canada itself, most of this is tree-thinning done in the name of fire prevention, pine-beetle “control” and—get this—“ecological restoration.” The logs are sold to mills all too eager to receive them.