The snowy winters of your childhood are gone for good

Last December was the warmest on record for much of the Midwest. It’s the beginning of a new normal. Tara Anand for BI

Jocie Nelson has been cross-country skiing for as long as she can remember. When she was growing up, the sport was her way of connecting with nature during the long, harsh Minnesota winters, where temperatures often reach the minus 30s. Thousands of Americans share her enthusiasm: Since high school, Nelson has joined nearly 15,000 other skiers in the American Birkebeiner, a 50-kilometer cross-country ski race through the small town of Hayward, Wisconsin. The crowds of spectators line several people deep.

“Everybody is cheering like crazy,” Nelson said of her first time crossing the finish line, “and it seems like they’re all cheering for you.”

Nelson is now approaching her 25th race, but this year, the event is facing major roadblocks. “We’re looking at a low-snow year. These bands of snow just completely have missed Hayward,” Shawn Connelly, the Birkebeiner Ski Foundation’s marketing and communications director, said. Despite worries around cancellation, the Birkebeiner is moving forward, albeit with a shortened and altered course.

Across much of the upper Midwest, last December was the warmest ever recorded. In Minneapolis, it was a tropical 54 degrees on Christmas. Minnesota’s State Climatology Office dubbed this year “The Lost Winter.” While the warm weather is in part exacerbated by this year’s El Niño weather pattern, it’s also a sign of what’s to come as the climate warms. February marked the first time Earth warmed 1.5 degrees Celsius over the prior 12 months, a milestone long dreaded by climate scientists. In other words, this isn’t just a fluke; it’s the beginning of a new normal.

The climate crisis is altering our winters forever — making them warmer, shorter, and less predictable. As a result, communities around the world are hurtling toward what the researchers Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin have dubbed “the snow-loss cliff.” Their research has found that once temperatures reach a certain threshold, snow disappears faster and faster. The magic number, it turns out, is an average winter temperature of 17 degrees Fahrenheit. After that, the warmer a region gets, the more rapidly it shifts toward a snow-free future. Snowpack is already on the decline in 23 watersheds across the Northern Hemisphere, and for much of the US Southwest and Northeast, “the train has left the station,” Gottlieb said in a statement.

Jocie Nelson and her family skiing the Birkie in costume in 2019. The American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation

For Nelson and everyone who has created identities and cultures around winter, a snowless future would be a profound loss. The Birkie is practically embedded in Nelson’s family lineage; her father-in-law just finished his 20th Birkie at 80 years old, and her children started skiing the youth tour when they were 3. “My mom used to tease us that we went to ski races to see 500 of our closest friends,” Nelson said.

But as snowless winters become more common across the country, these traditions are going to be harder and harder to maintain. As we lose the snow, we’re also losing part of our identities.

When I was growing up in Minnesota, winter was omnipresent. Every December, the Minneapolis lakes would freeze over, creating entirely new public parks. Ice fishers would drill holes and set up semipermanent houses on the ice, skijorers would train their dogs to pull them along the frozen lakes as they skied behind, rinks would be cleared and maintained for pond hockey and ice skating, intrepid swimmers did cold plunges in holes carved into the lake, and artists capitalized on the lack of building codes to set up shanties and interactive sculptures on the seasonal public space.

In many ways, snow, ice, and freezing temperatures are baked into the cultural DNA of Minneapolis and communities across the country. But this year, the casualties of a snowless winter — from canceled ski races and ice-fishing contests to nonexistent ice palaces — are stacking up.

For weeks, it wasn’t clear whether the Cross-Country World Cup, an international ski race that took place in Minneapolis on Presidents Day weekend, would happen. It was the first time in two decades that it was hosted in the US. But the warm temperatures and lack of snow leading up to the weekend left organizers rattled — a possibility that Claire Wilson, the executive director of the organization that hosted the event, the Loppet Foundation, couldn’t have imagined when planning started years ago.

This year’s course is a lone ribbon of snow amid a sea of brown grass and trees. The Loppet Foundation

“I said, ‘We’ll do it in February because there’s no way we won’t have snow in February,'” Wilson recalled last month. “I could not have envisioned a scenario where we could not make snow or we had no snow in January. It’s January, and we can’t. It’s 50 degrees outside.” The race is still set to take place, thanks to a late-January cold snap that allowed the organizers to make enough snow to cover the course. “It will not be the winter wonderland we had hoped for,” Wilson wrote in an email, “but it will be something!”

The Loppet Foundation also works with schools in north Minneapolis to teach kids how to ski. But this year, Wilson’s team has been stuck inside. “There was a whole lot of teaching kids how to put on their skis in the gym,” she said.

For Americans used to consistently frigid, snowy winters, this year’s tepid and rainy weather hangs uncomfortably. “There’s a joy that comes from being in that change of seasons,” Wilson said. “I just think we’re missing that joy. I hear it from my staff, I hear it from our participants. There’s a lot of folks who are just really missing winter, and it’s showing up as grief.”

Peter McClelland, a 55-year-old Minnesotan, is also feeling the loss from this year’s weird winter. On a winter camping trip in college, McClelland fell in love with dog sledding, and before long, he got a gig guiding dog-sled trips. “I was supposed to guide for only a year or two before I went to grad school,” he said with a laugh. “I haven’t been to grad school yet.”

For McClelland, dog sledding is an almost spiritual experience. “When you’re working with an animal together to accomplish a common goal, it’s a deeper connection,” he said.

McClelland started his own guiding business in Minnesota in 1995 and now has a team of 100 dogs that he leads to bring visitors on tours through the woods. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is usually his busiest season. This year, however, it rained over Christmas, and there was no snow — a first for McClelland, and a real hit to his business. “We don’t know how the rest of winter is going to go. But we’re going to lose a minimum of a third of our businesses, and I do not expect to be solvent again until March of 2025, if everything goes right,” McClelland said.

For McClelland, dog sledding is an almost spiritual experience. Peter McClelland

With warmer weather eating into the peak of the season, it’s getting harder and harder to sustain a winter-based business. “I do not feel that I have a business I could turn over to my kids,” he said.

The impact on his company isn’t the only thing McClelland is mourning. “The history of sled dogs and humans is so deep,” he told me. “To travel together is just such a rich experience and part of human history that, if we lose it, we’ve really lost something. And people won’t even know it.”

For much of the country, long, harsh winters aren’t exactly celebrated. Even in Minnesota, the only thing locals love more than winter is threatening to move to warmer states. As a kid, I remember frantically trying to melt the icicles in my ponytail with my palms so my hair wouldn’t snap off after walking to school in subzero temperatures. On those days, I’m sure I fantasized about warmer, sunnier weather too. But now, after two nearly snow-free years in New York City, where the climate was recently reclassified as “humid subtropical,” I miss those frigid January mornings filled with frozen tree branches that look dipped in glass.

For places with deep winter traditions, the changing climate could mean a permanent reconfiguration of our relationship with the season. In 2005, the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to mean a kind of homesickness — not for another place or time but for a climate or environment that no longer exists. To me, the feeling combines grief with a sense of uneasiness, a vague perception that things aren’t as they should be.

The reason that solastalgia is so powerful isn’t just that we’re mourning a specific environment or season but also that the changing environment alters our shared sense of identity.

“I actually think we’re grieving a changing environment very little,” Alexander Lee, an environmental philosopher at Alaska Pacific University, said. “The way that the change takes on any sort of either moral weight or cultural weight, or emotional weight, the way it takes on value, is how I relate to it.”

In other words, it’s not just the changing winters that we’re grieving but also the parts of ourselves that are changing with it.

One event that survived this year’s “lost winter” was the Great Northern, a 10-day festival in Minneapolis dedicated to the majesty of winter. Today it’s almost as much about the loss of winter as it is about the season itself. “The festival demonstrates how deeply winter has shaped our culture — what it does to us, how it makes us who we are,” Kate Nordstrum, the chief programming officer for the Great Northern, said. In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on the climate crisis; this year, along with events such as a sauna village and ice bar, there were talks on climate policy and climate-career options.

“It was meant to be a celebration of winter,” Nordstrum said. Now it’s also about the “fight to preserve it,” she added.

“People who have grown up in the North, whether it’s here or somewhere else that has deep winter snow, are starting to think back to childhood, and it almost feels like a dream,” she said. “You wonder: We may have some more glimpses of winter coming still, but will it continue fading?”

“People who have grown up in the North are starting to think back to childhood and it almost feels like a dream.” The American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation

This question weighs on me more heavily with each passing year. For me, winter has always been about the collective identity that we shape in these shared traditions in the cold — the intangible joy McClelland finds in his bond with his dogs, the community Nelson has built over decades at the Birkie, and the memories I share with childhood friends, sledding on the streets in a snowstorm, giggling and shrieking as we jumped into a frozen lake in January. These moments made up the old sense of normal that is being slowly eroded by the climate crisis. What can I someday share with my kids about a season that will be, in a few decades, so different from what I remember from my childhood?

Connelly of the Birkebeiner Ski Foundation is optimistic that winter culture will live on. He recalled the 1981 Birkie when it was 63 degrees and hundreds of volunteers showed up to shovel snow onto the course to make the race possible. “That just speaks to that resiliency,” he said. “We make lemonade. If we get low snow, we’re going to find that snow and use it as best we can to get out there.”

Wilson of the Loppet Foundation is less certain. Without snow and freezing temperatures, she said, winter is going to be different. “It is going to shift our identity,” she said. “I don’t think I have the answer to what that is going to look like. But the shift is underway.”

Alexandria Herr is a climate and environment writer from Minnesota residing in Brooklyn.