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Pique N' Your Interest

Hello Ullr? It’s me, Mitchell

Note to self: Ullr, the Norse God of snow, doesn’t like beans.

With no gear to throw in a sacrificial fire to Ullr this year, I threw a treasured can of beans in tomato sauce, my favourite powder day breakfast. There was a moment’s excitement when the can finally exploded, and the next day we were rewarded by one of our biggest blizzards of the early season.

Things were looking good in early December. It was cold, it was snowing, and weeks could go by without seeing the sun.

And then they started looking bad. It got colder. It got clearer. Snowfalls got smaller and smaller, and the crust underneath got harder and harder. The good ol’ West Coast snot – which falls in thick, wet flakes that stick to everything – never made an appearance.

Ullr stiffed us.

Things got even worse this week when a cold front that saw temperatures drop as low as minus 20 BEFORE wind chill, gave way to rain.

Things are supposed to get better for the weekend, but "better" is a relative term. We need a few weeks of solid dumpage before we can even call this an average season. Optimists are looking to February for salvation. Pessimists are oiling their bike chains.

Bad seasons happen. And if climate scientists are correct in their global warming predictions, then bad seasons will become more and more common in the future.

Whistler was built on one thing – a consistent snowfall. Not spectacular snow, but consistent snow. In a region where dry spells have hit the Interior hard in the past decade, consistency was everything.

Consistency was the reason this community could confidently build so many hotels and houses, and why we’re consistently a leading ski resort. More people who come here have good days than bad days, and they tell their friends, who tell their friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Yes, the terrain is huge and incredible, the restaurants and nightlife are second to none, there’s ample shopping and parking, and when the snow craps out you can always ride the stunts in the terrain park.

But without consistent snowfalls, this place loses the foundation on which it was built.

It’s too early to panic, but most people would probably agree that the most recent trends couldn’t have come at a worse time.

First of all, it’s the FIS Snowboard World Championships. Organizers are predicting a global television audience in the hundreds of millions for events, and it rained through both the parallel slalom and parallel giant slalom. And nobody will get to appreciate the view if it’s blocked out by fog and low-flying clouds.

Last week also saw a regional meeting of the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an American group that has been an incredible customer in recent years. Most of them probably left before the rain started, which probably means they left with frostbite.

This weather slump is also coming at a very challenging time for the resort, with overall business down in recent years due to a variety of factors (9/11, recession, the war in Iraq, SARS, etc.). Complicating matters, the Canadian dollar went up, which means Whistler is not as affordable as it used to be for middle class Americans.

We can probably get through a bad year or two. But if inconsistent weather is the new trend and consistency is Whistler’s trump card, we may be in serious trouble in the not-too-distant future.

Whistler has proved that it can weather almost anything. But can it weather bad weather? At what point do people say "let’s go somewhere else for a holiday this year?"

Consider these statistics:

• By Tuesday, more than halfway through January, Whistler has seen just 235 centimetres of cumulative snowfall.

• In comparison, we saw 478 centimetres in November and December of the 2003-04 season, 445 cm in the same period the year before, 528 cm the year before that, 252 in 2000-2001, and 487 in 1999-2000. The year we saw just 252 centimetres in November and December, we also had a moderate163 centimetres of snow in January – far more than has fallen so far this month.

In a way these concerns are academic – we can’t control the weather after all.

Or can we? If changing weather patterns are a result of global climate change, how many of us are doing things to mitigate our contribution of greenhouse gases to the problem? How many people are taking the David Suzuki Foundation’s Nature Challenge? How many people are taking the federal government’s One Tonne Challenge, thereby helping Canada meet its Kyoto Accord commitments?

According to some of the world’s leading scientists, this is crunch time for mother earth. Global warming trends have already started – the polar caps are melting, sea levels are rising, some areas are experiencing record droughts while others are seeing droughts and events like floods and hurricanes are getting stronger and more frequent. Natural weather cycles like El Nino and La Nina – which no one had even heard of until a few years ago – are causing widespread disruptions. The first major global warming disasters are expected in the next 20 years, if they aren’t already happening.

People are always saying that children are the future. I say that’s a cop-out – if anything, we’re the future for our children. Anything we do or fail to do today will affect future generations, whether it’s adding to the national debt or pumping a few million extra tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air.

And then again, maybe Ullr just doesn’t like baked beans. If that’s the case, I’m truly sorry, and I’ll make it up to you and everyone in next year’s bonfire.

Ullr, if you’re up there, please give us a sign. Thirty centimetres a day for the next 90 days should do it.