For the past three seasons, drought conditions have marred the heliski industry, which depends on adequate snowfall. Snowfall in Southeast is 50 to 80 percent lower than average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the problem of abnormally low snowpack has become so pronounced that the National Drought Mitigation Center coined a new term for it—snow drought.
“Haines area seems to have taken a bigger hit this year,” said Arron Jacobs, a senior hydrologist at NOAA who specializes in regional weather patterns. “Haines Customs reported that for the last two months of January and February, where they were supposed to get 50-60 inches of snow, they got nine,” he said.
Two months of drought in the beginning of winter was followed by excessive rainfall at elevations above 5000 feet in March, said Scott Sundberg, owner of Southeast Alaska Backcountry Adventures (SEABA). He called the weather “devastating on the range,” and his bookings reflect that. For the first time since 2014, Sundberg doesn’t think SEABA will ski half of its allocated ski days.
Sean Brownell, owner of Alaska Heliskiing, said “We’ve just been waiting for a reasonable snowfall to turn these mountains back to good.” He said bookings have been suffering, too. “We didn’t see the last three seasons coming. We expected a normal situation, and so we’re kind of caught off guard with it,” he said. This year Brownell said he had to turn away 33 customers due to poor mountain conditions, which is a loss of about $350,000.
heliski companies are also tied to their contracts with helicopter operators. They guarantee the heli operators a minimum number of hours over the season, and so they are under financial pressure to take people skiing, because they pay for the time, whether or not they use it. heliski operators are stuck if the weather conditions are bad: they have to ensure the safety of their customers, and meet their customers’ expectations.
“This is a dream for people to come to Alaska. Some people save for a couple of years to do this, and for me to willingly take their money and serve them up a turd sandwich?” said Brownell, “That’s nothing I wanna be a part of.”
“We’ve been seeing these big wonky weather systems” said Jacobs that deflect wetter weather away from the region. “It goes south or west. It seems like there was a drastic change or flip after 2014 or 2015 where Southeast had one of its wettest years, and as soon 2016 came around it went down; it got very low, below normal.”
These trends disturb not only seasonal activities like heliskiing, insufficient precipitation seriously impacts local ecologies and societies as well. “If you don’t have enough snowpack up in the mountain, you don’t have enough runoff to help fill your reservoirs,” said Jacobs.
Haines heliski operators have made efforts to adjust to recent declines in snowfall. SEABA has shortened its tours from one week to 48 hours (what Sundberg calls his on-call ‘hit-list’ of clients), which will have further implications for tourism in Haines, he said: customers won’t be staying in town before and after their trips. Brownell just got back from Yakutat, where he had to take a group, who had expected to heliski in Haines, surfing.
About 30 years from now, NOAA projects that Southeast will become a warmer and wetter environment. For now, though, “what we’re seeing is all that wetter weather is just not hitting Southeast Alaska, and that’s indicative of changing climate patterns globally,” said Jacobs.
In response to climate changes, Brownell thinks that restructuring the heliski season might save his business: “Since global warming has changed this industry, in Haines especially, I think we would still be able to offer a great product if we were able to offer it earlier in the winter. We always sit here in November and December and wish that we could go heliskiing. That might be the one way that we could still use our allotted skier days and still have a business here.”
But until something changes, Brownell said, “It would be hard to hang on if it does this year after year after year.”