Ski resorts dealing with fewer snow days

For Bloomberg Green, Jin Wu, Laura Millan and Hayley Warren, on the challenges ski resorts face with rising temperatures:

Artificial snowmaking has become more efficient, so it uses less water and electricity. But even with advanced technology, fake snow can’t always be deployed — and climate change is creating a more difficult environment, making water more scarce and temperatures too high for it to freeze. This year, skyrocketing energy prices forced some resorts in Japan to shut down their snow cannons and wait for natural flakes to fall.

The piece starts with a horizontal scroll through the mountains and then transitions to the chart above. There’s a nice flow between the photo into the abstract view, so they don’t seem like two separate things.

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Book of hand-painted ski maps

When you go skiing or snowboarding, you get a map of the mountain that shows the terrain and where you can go. James Niehues is the man behind many of these hand-painted ski maps around the world, and he has a kickstarter to catalog his life’s work.

This is kind of amazing. I went skiing a lot as a kid, and I have distinct memories of these maps. I would stand at the top of the mountain, rip off one of my gloves with my teeth, and then pull out a folded map from a zipped pocket. I never knew they were by the same man, but in retrospect, it makes sense.

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Mikaela Shiffrin pulling away for gold

Mikaela Shiffrin won her first gold medal in PyeongChang with a fraction of a second lead. In events where athletes race side-by-side, it’s easier to see how close such a lead is. But with alpine skiing, it feels more like a race against a clock. So to capture some of the dramatics of the former, Derek Watkins and Denise Lu for The New York Times imagined the results had all skiers raced down at the same time.

It reminds of The Times’ coverage of Usain Bolt in the 2012 Summer Olympics.

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Skiers relax by a fire at a Stowe dormitory in Vermont, August…



Skiers relax by a fire at a Stowe dormitory in Vermont, August 1967.
Photograph by B. Anthony Stewart, National Geographic