The T-bar that hauls you to the top of Cochran’s Ski Area in Richmond, Vermont, drips oil when it rains, and sometimes passes riders through a thick cloud of diesel smoke from the engine powering the rope tow. The family-run ski area — a hill, really — offers skiers and snowboarders three surface lifts, eight trails, and all of about 350 feet in vertical drop. In other words, Cochran’s isn’t a big place or a particularly fancy one — but it is perfect. And if someone had told 10-year-old me riding that T-bar in 2015 that it would be the last time I would experience a “real” winter in Vermont, I wouldn’t have believed them.
In a sense, that’s what it probably was — the last real winter in Vermont. It was the last winter that average temperatures in the state dipped colder than 17.9 degrees, the 20th-century average. Temperatures have steadily increased since then — last winter’s average was 27.1 degrees, the warmest on record — and the natural snow has been frustratingly less and less reliable.
I’ve seen this myself over the past decade. I grew up in Williston, just a 15-minute drive from Cochran’s, where I learned to ski, as did thousands of kids before me. Alpine racing is in the air at the place, and I went on to compete for Green Mountain Valley School (a ski academy in Waitsfield), and now for Saint Michael’s College near Burlington, where I’m a sophomore. Even compared with when I first started racing, our seasons start later and end earlier, with wildly inconsistent snow cycles in between.
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Barbara Ann Cochran and her three siblings, the second generation to own Cochran’s, which opened in the 1960s, have a much longer view into these worrisome trends. “We grew up with natural snow, and in the winters we had so much more snow than we do now,” she tells me. “I keep wondering for you younger racers: How long are we going to be able to maintain the ski racing and the winter snow sports?”
That’s a question that ski area operators in Vermont and across New England have been reckoning with for years now. Between 1980 and 2005, the Northeast averaged 95 days of snow cover per year, according to a 2022 study coauthored by Elizabeth Burakowski, a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Earth Systems Research Center. If carbon emissions continue at the current pace, the number of snow-covered days could be cut nearly in half by the middle of this century.
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Considering the expense of skiing — and the unpredictability of the weather — even lifelong skiers and riders such as Burakowski can’t bring themselves to commit to season passes. “There are only so many weekends when I have availability,” she says. “The odds of me hitting a good day are becoming low enough where it’s no longer worth it for me to buy a pass.”
The major ski resorts tend to have the resources to weather economic unpredictability, but it’s historically been a different story for the smaller ski areas — often run by families, colleges, clubs, and local communities — that once dotted New England. Since the heyday of rope tows and T-bars in the 1960s, some 120 ski areas have closed in Vermont alone, according to the New England Lost Ski Areas Project website, where author and founder Jeremy Davis has been collecting histories for 25 years. By Davis’s count, about 600 ski areas across New England, mostly smaller ones, have shut down over the decades, including 79 in Maine, and 172 each in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
The story of Cochran’s, however, isn’t about buckling to the unpredictable ravages of climate change or the punishing economics of ski area operation — far from it. Instead, it’s about adaptability and endurance, even in the face of increasingly steep odds. And it’s a story that might just promise some hope for the otherwise bleak outlook for skiing in New England.
In the beginning, Cochran’s was meant to be a place where Mickey Cochran and his wife, Ginny, could get their four children out on the slopes during the week. Mickey, an engineer who worked at General Electric in Burlington, carved trails out of the woods behind their Richmond home, and built its first rope tow, right outside the back door of their home, in 1961. “Sports were always important to our family, and especially skiing,” Barbara Ann Cochran recalls. “Mom and Dad felt it was an important opportunity for all kids to be able to have a healthy outlet for something to do in the winter.”
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Barbara Ann and her three siblings all went on to become expert alpine racers and competed for the US Ski Team in the Olympics. Dubbed “The Skiing Cochrans,” they were regularly featured in Life magazine and other news outlets — and Barbara Ann won a gold medal in slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. (The family tradition continues: Six of the third-generation Cochran racers also made it to the US National Team and have competed in multiple Olympic Games. Barbara Ann’s son, Ryan Cochran-Siegle, now races on the World Cup circuit.)
But even from the earliest days, the mission of Cochran’s wasn’t about training Olympians, it was about getting kids out on the slopes to learn in a place that was accessible and affordable. Since it opened to the public, Cochran’s has hosted after-school programs and helped thousands of kids ski through the Ski Tots and race programs. Back in the ’60s, it cost 25 cents to ski for the afternoon, but even now they’ve held prices extraordinarily low. A ticket tops out at $19 for an adult on weekends, and $295 gets a full-season pass for a family of any size. (Kids under 5 and seniors over 72 ski free of charge.) For those with a financial need, Cochran’s also offers free or reduced-price passes.
The family wants to offer a corrective to the perception of downhill skiing as an elitist pastime. They always “felt it was important not to make it impossible for other families to be able to ski,” Cochran says. “It’s affordable — people can come.”
Making the economics work, however, hasn’t been easy. In 1998, after Mickey died, the family converted Cochran’s to a nonprofit, the first ski area in the nation to do so. (Barbara Ann’s brother, Bobby, likes to joke that their ski area “was always a nonprofit” — the federal designation just made it official.) The status lets Cochran’s accept donations of older equipment and support from bigger operators such as Sugarbush and Berkshire East Mountain Resort. It’s now partly staffed by volunteers, and benefits from regular community fund-raisers.
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In recent years, other ski areas have been experimenting with alternate business models, following a trail blazed by Cochran’s. After privately owned Mount Ascutney in Vermont closed in 2010, it took a toll on the town of West Windsor, leading to jobs leaving the area and property taxes spiking. In 2015, Ascutney was given a new life by a community-led nonprofit that now runs it year round. More recently, Jackson, New Hampshire, residents stepped in to help struggling Black Mountain Ski Area, aiming to convert it into a community-supported co-op model. “We don’t want to build empires,” Erik Mogensen, who is helping lead the effort, told the Globe last fall. “We want to support causes.”
If the first big challenge facing small ski areas is operating costs, the second is the decline in natural snow. Cochran’s relied on Mother Nature for its first four decades, but by the early 2000s it faced a number of seasons when it struggled to keep trails open. It leaned into serious snowmaking in 2007, with help from Natick, Massachusetts-based HKD Snowmakers, which offered them equipment at a cost that they could afford. “If we didn’t have snowmaking, there were years that we wouldn’t have been able to open the ski area,” Cochran says. Every spring, Cochran’s holds a race they call TGFS, an acronym for Thank God for Snowmaking.
Almost all ski areas in Eastern North America now have machine-made snow, says Daniel Scott, professor and research chair in the department of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Scott is part of the team that conducted the first study to provide a national analysis of snowmaking’s environmental sustainability as an adaptation strategy for ski resorts.
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Snowmaking, of course, uses water and energy, but Scott argues it can’t be easily written off as unsustainable. “Most of the water, 80 to 90 percent that you put on the hill, is coming back into the same watershed the next spring,” he says, though he notes it’s best to draw water from a reservoir built for that purpose so you’re not restricted by the minimum flow requirement from rivers and streams. (Cochran’s pumps water from the Winooski River across the road.)
When people think snowmaking is detrimental, they don’t always see how it’s also lowering emissions by keeping people closer to home. Staying relatively local to ski is actually a lower-impact activity compared with vacationers going “to Vegas for the weekend , or on a cruise, [or] whatever the heck they choose to do differently,” Scott says. “Pretty much every option, unless they stay home, has an even bigger carbon footprint associated with it.”
In Vermont, a partnership between the association of ski areas, Ski Vermont, and Efficiency Vermont, a program from the state public utility board, has worked to make the industry more sustainable, completing more than 750 projects since 2000. That’s more than 30 projects “a year that the ski industry has done to increase their operational efficiency and decrease their carbon emissions,” says Molly Mahar, Ski Vermont’s president. “Over the lifetime these projects are saving over a billion-kilowatt hours of electricity.”
In 2014, one such project focused on working with the majority of alpine ski areas in the state to change the bulk of their snow guns to versions that are more energy-efficient and use less water. “As the weather gets a little bit more unpredictable,” Mahar says, “we need to be able to make snow in shorter windows, so all those efficiencies are really important.”
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When Scott and other researchers look ahead, they predict two sorts of futures: a low-carbon emission one, and a high emission one. A low-emission future would mean global warming manages to stay under the 1.5 degree Celsius benchmark set by the Paris Climate Agreement. If we stayed around that level, the conditions of last winter — Vermont’s warmest ever — would be the new normal. “But you would still recognize the ski industry,” Scott says.
Some ski areas would still struggle, however, and some would close. “There’s no question about that — you can’t have a winter like we just had repeatedly,” Scott says. “The independents just do not have the cash flow to get through two crummy winters like that back to back.”
In a high-emissions future, one in which warming exceeds 2 degrees Celsius and continues at the rate we’ve been going, Scott predicts all the negative impacts we’ve been seeing would be amplified several times over. That’s a future where much of the New England ski industry stops resembling anything like we once knew. “Basically,” Scott says, for skiing “in the Northeast you’d have [only] high-elevation Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, and Quebec left.”
It’s easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom of climate change. But there has been good news for Vermont, too. Despite the changes to the seasons, skier visitation in Vermont has held steady at around 4 million visits per year, says Mahar, the Ski Vermont president. She’s also seen a change in attitudes and investments while lobbying for the industry in Washington, D.C. Five or six years ago, there were more people who didn’t think climate change was real. In the past three years, however, “We’ve had the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and those are two of the most consequential pieces of climate and energy legislation we’ve ever had.”
Burakowski is hopeful about the trends she’s seeing, too. An International Energy Agency report from fall 2023 suggests that we’ll reach peak emissions by 2025, and they’ll start to decline after that. “That’s what their market trends are showing in terms of energy usage,” Burakowski says. “Solar has become a lot cheaper, renewables in general across the board are becoming the more affordable option, and that will help to drive emissions reductions across the board.”
At Cochran’s, they’re keeping one eye on the future, but another on their mission — being a place that allows families to teach the next generation of skiers, Barbara Ann Cochran’s grandkids among them. “I’m glad they’ve learned to ski and love it so much — that they have the chance now to enjoy it,” she says. “Because it may not be that far into the future when skiing will only be something we reminisce about because it won’t exist anymore.”
She isn’t sure if that will happen, or when. But she’s confident that Cochran’s Ski Area will continue to do what it’s always done. “I do think the Cochran family business will still thrive,” she says, “and the future generations will figure out some form of recreation for the public, although it may evolve to something else.”
Ada Jones is majoring in digital media and communications at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.