A Leitwind turbine at Grouse Mountain, British Columbia. Image: New West snow blog.
This article, by Kristen Lummis writing on the New West snow blog, has a number of salient points for people interested in local renewable energy. Unlike in Australia, a growing number of resorts in North America and elsewhere are moving down the path of producing their own energy to run their operations. Many of them are using turbines. And the turbines are proving to be tourist draw cards.
Maybe we could start thinking outside the box when it comes to reducing the environmental footprint of our resorts while also driving greater decentralisation of energy supply? Having a turbine in the background is a good reminder that the energy running the lifts and buildings (and possibly making snow) has to come from somewhere, so it’s better if its environmentally benign.
We will also be showing the festival at Dinner Plain in August. Stay tuned for details.
Showing in Melbourne, April 2011
Many thanks to everyone who showed up. We will need a bigger venue next time ...
The Winter Wildlands Alliance created the Backcountry Film Festival in 2005 to help grassroots and professional filmmakers to show audiences their love of the winter outdoors. Since then, the annual festival has been shown in more than 30 towns and cities, and raised thousands of dollars to help efforts to preserve our winter environment.
The 2011 film festival is showing in Australia.
This tuesday, April 12
Films start at 8 pm. Please feel free to arrive earlier to grab a drink.
At 303 (303 High street, Northcote, Melbourne), tram stop #32 on the #86 tram. Its just next door to the Northcote Social Club.
Protect Our Winters is the environmental centre point of the winter sports community, united towards a common goal of reducing climate change’s effects on our sport and local mountain communities.
We believe that to really effect things, consumer behaviour needs to change and that the power of an actively participating and united community can have a direct influence on climate change, now and for generations behind us.
This year’s festival features:
Best of the Festival: Teton Gravity Research’s festival cut of “Deeper” follows legendary snowboarder Jeremy Jones and other top riders as they forsake helicopters, snowmobiles and lifts to venture deep into untouched terrain under their own power.
Best Short Film: “Desert River” from Sweetgrass Productions, is a beautiful ski adventure into Alaska.
Best Environmental Film: “Whitebark Warrior” from TreeFight and Snaz Media, chronicles the decline of thousand-year old whitebark pines due to climate change and efforts underway to save these iconic high alpine trees.
Australia has any number of well known sports people. What sometimes surprises me is how few prominent skiers/ boarders – that is people connected with our mountains – actually speak out on environmental issues. This example from the excellent Wend magazine profiles extreme skier from the USA, Alison Gannett, and her advocacy work on climate change.
There are plenty of people out there talking about climate change. But how many are actually doing something about it? Even those of us who spend a lot of time outdoors can be guilty of contributing to the destruction of the natural environment we love. We fly in jets from place to place for the sake of adventure. And many of us are still driving low gas mileage, carbon emitting SUVs. Our active lifestyles can really hurt the planet. So that’s why we can all take a few lessons from professional skier and environmental advocate Alison Gannett.
“I went to school for climate change and majored in education for environmental issues. And then I went to school for solar design for alternative home building,” she said. “At the same time, I had a professional skiing career, doing crazy things like the X-Games and jumping off cliffs for a living.” While she had two careers running parallel to one another, Gannett suffered a devastating crash at the X-Games and because she was badly injured and unable to compete, several of her sponsors immediately dropped her. That got Gannett to thinking.
“I realized how shallow a lot of my ski industry sponsors were,” she said. “I decided, wouldn’t it be cool to partner with companies that have more at stake and care more about than just selling clothing?” Though many of the competitors and colleagues thought she was crazy for chasing the more lucrative sponsorship deals, Gannett changed her professional priorities to work instead with companies who share her environmentally conscious values. “I want to chase ethics,” she said. “I want to work with companies that have the same beliefs that I do.”
It turns out that there are plenty of sponsors out there willing to support Gannett’s mission to raise awareness for the ongoing crisis of climate change. Blending her interests in sustainable living and an active lifestyle, she’s proven to be a very effective spokesperson for both. “As an athlete getting older, I’d have to say that I have better sponsor relationships now than I ever did,” she said. “And now working with the Save Our Snow Foundation and working with schools, working with Congress, working with the White House I’m saving our snow, saving our planet and making the world a better place.”
Allison Gannett is the kind of adventure athlete that walks her talk. While still leading an exciting life as a professional skier, she’s making a big difference in educating the general public on the realities of climate change. And through her work at the Save Our Snow Foundation and on her own organic farm in Colorado, she’s showing us what we each can to do to slow it down.
As spring kicks in and the snowmass melts, it feels like time to acknowledge what an incredible winter it has been: massive snow falls interspaced with rain and warmer weather and crazy storms. A number of resorts were isolated as treefall and landslips cut roadways. In August almost 2 metres of snow fell across the alps, and now (early October) there is still good skiable snow across much of the higher areas.
The following are some images from the Hotham/ Feathertop area in Victoria from June until now.
Near Mt McKay, heading to Pretty Valley, Bogong High Plains, VIC
If you’re an Australian skier or boarder, and unless you’ve been living under a log these past few months, you will know that ski legend Steve Lee has been running commercial backcountry ski tours out of Falls Creek resort this winter.
This is great. Getting people out of resorts and into the backcountry is to be supported and encouraged.
What is less great is the emphasis on the use of snowmobiles to get people out there. His tours are geared towards ‘strong’ intermediate skiers and boarders. So if people are fit enough to ski/ board hard terrain, then surely they are fit enough to get on some skis to actually get out there.
In my opinion, this ‘cheap grace’ approach to getting backcountry is a sad development in Victoria. Certainly, the tours are confined to the alpine resort area (even though this is ecologically part of the Bogong High Plains). However, they come with a high annoyance cost to people who are out there under their own steam. It is not clear what ecological assessment, if any, has been made of the tours – for instance, is there an impact on endangered species or vegetation? There is also a bigger picture here: there is the fact that these tours could be a precedent for future snowmobile based developments elsewhere in the alps.
Anyone who has skied backcountry in North America will know the many problems that come with rampant and often uncontrolled snowmobile use. While here in Australia recreational use of snowmobiles is supposedly controlled or banned (for instance in national parks), how often is this actually enforced? As one example, there is growing use within the Alpine national park in the area between Dinner Plain and Mt Hotham and around Dinner Plain village with apparently no intervention from land managers.
Snowmobiles are essential tools in resort management and search and rescue operations. However, the blanket endorsement of commercial use of snowmobiles in the backcountry in almost all Falls Creek promotional materials this winter shows that resorts ‘commitment’ to the environment as being shallow at best and probably a form of green wash.
We should be very cautious about the further introduction of a potentially destructive development in our alpine areas, which appears to have jumped all the approvals ‘hoops’ simply because the proponent of the development is an alpine ‘personality’.
Falls Creek Resort says that it is deeply concerned about good environmental management:
“We are extremely proud of Falls Creek’s reputation as an industry leader in the field of sustainable alpine tourism and development. Our environmental programs reduce our impact on the local environment and acknowledge the importance of maintaining a healthy world beyond our boundary”.
Further information on their approach to the environment is here.
If you have an opinion about the expansion of snowmobiles into the backcountry you may wish to let the resort management know about them.
fcrm@fallscreek.com.au
The US-based Mountain Riders Alliance has now gone global:
Bon Accord spur, VIC
“A new paradigm is emerging in ski area management: one that’s globally-based, rider-centric, environmentally sustainable, sensitive to local needs, and skier-and-snowboarder-owned
“Rising lift ticket costs, negative impacts on ski communities and the environment, and the desire to combat climate change have all led concerned skiers and snowboarders to form a global collaborative group, Mountain Rider’s Alliance (MRA).
“MRA is a movement of snow enthusiasts who are dedicated to changing the ways ski areas are run. MRA’s mission is to create rider-owned-and-operated ski areas that are rider-centric, environmentally sustainable and sensitive to local cultural, social and economic concerns”.
late August, snow buckets down day & night across the Alps
Its hard not to feel envious when you look at those photos from the late 19th century that were taken as the miners and loggers made their way up the deep valleys below the alpine peaks and built villages and new towns. Places like Harrietville, at the head of the Ovens River below Mt Feathertop, seem to have had regular dumps of snow through the winter months. Now, if we just get some snow flurries down that far it rates as an event.
Of course, Australian weather has always been famous for being erratic. And if you look at the snow pack records that chart winter snow depths over the past 3 decades you can see wild variety between the seasons.
Climate skeptics love to point to cold weather and hard winters as ‘proof’ that climate change is not real, but this just reveals more about their ignorance of how climate change is expected to work than proving any other point. Some climate campaigners prefer to use the word ‘climate chaos’ because this gives a better indication of what the science tells us is coming: ever more erractic and extreme weather events. In our part of the world, this will include drought, flood, fire, and extreme weather events like torrential rain.
This info is easy to find. It is not the stuff of hysterical greenies hiding in caves. It is from the mainstream of the climate science community. In a democracy we can think what we like. But having an opinion which runs counter to science doesn’t mean climate change is not happening. One of the things that strikes me – in a week where much of western and north eastern Victoria has been flooded, people evacuated, the road to Falls Creek was cut, and a landslip closed operations briefly at Hotham resort, is how quickly we can adapt to changed conditions and accept them as the ‘new’ normal behaviour of the weather. Just a week before that we had those wild snowfalls that blocked the Hotham Road for a day and a half and dumped almost a metre of powder across the alps. Then throw your mind back to July, and the gray rainy skies that brought miserable conditions and mediocre snow.
My point here is not to stir up fear, or to slate all this strange winter to climate change. Its just to remind ourselves that what we have experienced has not been an ‘ordinary’ winter. Sure, we need to grab the good winters when they do come along, and ski or board as hard as we can. We probably need to grumble and find other things to do in the winters that don’t happen. But we should never lose sight of the fact that all of whats happening is consistent with what climate science tells us is coming, unless we decide to do something serious as a global community to greatly reduce our greenhouse emissions.
And for me that’s reason enough to do what we can where can, to reduce our impact, and to get action at the community, corporate and government level.
With the fantastic snowfalls of the past week, theres no shortage of great skiing and boarding options across the Alps.
But many of the backcountry destinations are equally fantastic. For people not experienced in backcountry trips (often remote, and sometimes requiring long access) a good ‘warm up’ option is to get out in the ‘side country’ – those areas just outside ski resorts with easy access.
This quick guide canvasses some of the options available close to Mount Hotham in Victoria. There are similar opportunities at almost every other resort in the country.
BE AWARE that there is some avalanche risk with a number of these slopes at present. If you’re not familiar with avalanche risk assessment, please don’t visit these areas.
The winter that started slow has turned into an incredible season. Almost 2 metres of snow has fallen in higher areas of the Alps this month and the current batch of powder is deep and dry and gives some incredible skiing and boarding.
There are updates on snow conditions on the Mountain Watchwebsite.
These are just a few random images from the Hotham area from today.
Be aware that there is some avalanche risk in back country areas such as along the Razorback.
The current gos on the mountain (friday 27th) is that the Hotham – Harrietville road will be open by lunchtime today.
Protect Our Winters was created as a way to bring the winter sports community together to fight climate change and its effects on our mountains.
It is the environmental center point of the winter sports community, united towards a common goal of reducing climate change’s effects on our sport and local mountain communities.
POW has just released their 2010 trailer video.
You can watch it here.
For details on POW in Australia, check here.
Well, for everyone who has been suffering with all this dwindling snow, rainy days and warm weather, the front that’s passing over the Australian Alps this weekend is definitely a sight for sore eyes.
Wire Plain, VIC
With a good start to the season back in June that then faded off, backcountry skiing has been exceptionally sketchy over the past week or so, and even in resorts most have only about 30 per cent of their trails open. That situation will change this week….
A classic image from the Victorian Alps: Mt Feathertop from Hotham. But without serious action on climate change now, our alpine areas are at grave risk.
First Protect our Winters (POW) Australia action alert
The Victorian government is in the final stages of deciding what type of Climate Bill it will deliver as part of it’s election commitments.
Similar Bills in other places – for instance, the UK and Scotland – have set ambitious greenhouse emissions reductions targets (Scotland has committed to 42% reductions by 2020).
We must urge the Victorian government to deliver a strong, world leading Bill. The final decision about the Bill is being taken now. And a strong Bill will greatly reduce Victoria’s contribution to climate change through driving a shift away from our reliance on polluting brown coal power.
POW Australia has issued its first action alert, asking people to email the Premier, John Brumby. It is available here.
We hope POW supporters, skiers and boarders from across Australia will support this on line campaign. Lets get the Australian winter sports community mobilised to protect our winters.
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