I’ve subscribed to Backcountry magazine for at least a decade. Wonderful images of glorious mountains, good stories, and a lot of practical info for backcountry people. And it makes me feel connected to a global community of snow freaks who enjoy doing the hard work and who are willing to ‘earn their turns’ through old fashioned uphill travel.

If you follow mainstream science you will know that climate change is impacting winters. Here in Australia, snow pack has been in decline since at least 1957. Yet there is still a lot of very weird denial about climate change in the snow community. So when you dare to link science and declining snow pack you’ll normally get yelled at. But that shouldn’t stop us for talking about the facts. And BC mag has done a good job of that in their current edition, subtitled ‘hidden routes, extinct lines and the future of skiing in a melting world’.

There is the usual goodness up the front: beautiful images, the ‘joys’ of skiing in the rain (hello, Australian snow), an interesting piece on concussion recovery, stories that recognise some of the diversity of the backcountry community and a great spread about adventures in Kazakhstan … Then we get to the heavy stuff. The loss of glaciers in Patagonia and British Columbia. Ryan Stuart reflects on the grief of acknowledging loss and asks ‘what will the world be like without snow and ice. What will we lose when the glaciers are gone‘? Mapping the loss of glaciers in Oregon via citizen science. And a piece on how the loss of the glaciers and stable snow pack is leading to many historic routes becoming unskiable. Legendary snowboarder Jeremy Jones has often spoken of the idea of ‘last descents’ – lines that are becoming unridable because of global warming.

It also talks of efforts to slow the impacts of warming – such as the Swiss resorts that are using protective blankets to slow summer melt.

Read the stories in the second half of the mag and you will feel sombre and sad, and, hopefully motivated to do something. Snow pack is in decline due to human induced global heating. But as we are reminded in one story – history is not yet done, we are writing it every day, and we can decide to change how the story ends: ‘If humans reverse the warming of the planet, Oregon’s glaciers could gain mass again, undoing decades of loss’.

Remember – action is always the antidote to despair – resources on getting active are available here.