All That Glitters Is Not Snow: How Ski Resorts Are Replicating Reality

Over the past six years, I’ve lived in three towns that revolve around winter sports: Collingwood, Ontario, and its Blue Mountain Resort; Val-Morin in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains, with nearby Sommet Saint-Sauveur resort; and Bromont, Quebec, with its montagne d’expériences.

One of the first things I noticed, as someone who began learning how to snowboard in her late thirties, is how much of the snow wasn’t snow at all. Not exactly, at least. It’s not that the flakes aren’t real; they just don’t fall from the sky naturally.

As soon as weather conditions permit—that is to say, the sustained cold temperatures that usually arrive in late fall—the snowmaking begins at Bromont, montagne d’expériences and elsewhere. Snowmaking in ski resorts involves spraying water and pressurized air through specialized cannons to create artificial snow when there isn’t enough natural snowfall.

The Laurentians’ Mont Tremblant Ski Resort, the largest in the province with its 102 slopes, uses 1.3 million cubic metres of water annually to produce artificial snow—that’s about 520 Olympic-size swimming pools. And, though specific numbers are hard to come by, a large resort can consume about the same energy seasonally as thousands of homes do in a year.

Critics accuse the industry of clinging to an outdated model, of using too much energy for lifts, gondolas, grooming fleets, and too much water for snowmaking for something that isn’t exactly necessary. And as winters are getting shorter and the planet is warming, the industry’s having to churn out more and more fake snow.

So, my new (and expensive) hobby felt not merely like a privilege but also potentially ecologically harmful—a sport refusing to accept climate change. I reasoned that ski resorts must be a drain on our natural resources, a sustainability maladaptation.

“Many people would have the same gut response that snowmaking can’t be sustainable,” says Daniel Scott, professor and research chair in the department of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo, who’s recently published reports on the topic. “Snowmaking has been given an unfair reputation in this respect, because it’s not binary. It’s not [that snowmaking] is unsustainable, or it’s sustainable. It’s a spectrum.”

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Quebec, it turns out, is on the sustainable end. Many of its roughly eighty ski resorts draw on purpose-built reservoirs. These human-made water storage facilities are specifically designed to supply ski resorts with the large volumes of water needed for artificial snow production. They are meant to provide a reliable water source without overburdening lakes, rivers, or municipal supplies (though there can be exceptions, especially during periods of drought). Mont Tremblant sources its snowmaking water from Lac Tremblant on its south side and from the Diable River on the north side. In the spring, when artificial snow melts, it returns to the source.

Quebec ski resorts also draw their energy from a largely decarbonized grid. Hydro-Québec, the province’s utility Crown corporation that generates and distributes electricity, produces most of its energy—over 99 percent—from renewable hydropower, with few or no greenhouse gas emissions. So, according to Scott, when snow is made in Quebec, those resorts are not contributing to climate change. By contrast, ski hubs that still rely on coal as part of their energy grid, like Alberta or Colorado for example, release emissions as they power snow lifts or make snow.

“If you’re a Quebecer who has an electric vehicle charged by a pretty much decarbonized grid going to a ski resort in Quebec whose lift tickets, heat, and snowmaking are all from the same grid . . . that’s as close to a net-zero winter holiday as you get,” says Scott. “That’s much less of a carbon footprint than hopping on a plane and flying to Whistler. So, Montrealers can feel good.”

Artificially made snow is increasingly a staple of winter tourism. It’s not just that the season isn’t long enough anymore; it’s also that conditions are progressively becoming more unreliable. “There will still be a winter in 2070, but we are going to have to face a lot of variability,” says Gabrielle Larose, director of strategic knowledge and sustainability at l’Association des stations de ski du Québec. “It’s a challenge on the teams [who staff ski resorts], because you’re not quite sure if you are really going to work if there’s a bad winter coming.”

The people who keep these resorts and their communities running are a mix of long-time residents and seasonal workers. Locals, like some of my neighbours, often work in tourism, retail, or real estate, while seasonal workers take up jobs as ski instructors, lift operators, and hospitality staff. For those who have built their lives around the mountain slopes, an entire season’s wages can be thrown off by one warm December. But at least the mountains here are still operating their resorts. Other parts of the world are not so lucky.

Across Europe, especially in the Alps and Pyrenees, climate change has already forced several ski resorts to shut down permanently after years of dwindling snowfall made operations financially impossible. And recent studies estimate that as many as a quarter of Alpine ski areas now face severe snow scarcity.

To avoid this fate, the ski industry in Canada has begun to institutionalize sustainability in an even more organized fashion. In November 2025, the Canadian Ski Council partnered with the consultancy GreenStep to launch the national Ski Industry Stewardship Program with the goal of making ski areas more environmentally sustainable. The program includes workshops with regional associations and, beginning this year, a training program to help resorts implement more environmentally responsible operations. While still in its early stages, the initiative marks a growing recognition that ski resorts can no longer rely on the predictability of Canadian winters.

And so, beneath the hum of chairlifts and the shouts of excitement on the slopes, there’s an undercurrent that’s hard for me to ignore. It may feel easy sometimes to push aside the ecological quandaries of this sport—the snow, one way or another, is there. But snowmaking doesn’t make the problem disappear. It just buys time.