This article is featured in the 2026 Winter Carnival Issue.
Winters define New Hampshire both culturally and economically. For many Granite Staters, activities like skiing, sledding or snowshoeing are at the heart of their winter traditions. Behind the scenes however, operators, economists and climatologists are making plans for a future that is anything but predictable.
As winter’s warmth and snowfall become more variable, industries built around cold weather are being forced to rethink if and how their model can hold.
Scientists project a trend of warmer winters
Despite this winter’s high snow amount, long-term trends point toward warming. According to New Hampshire state climatologist Mary Stampone, winter is changing faster than many residents realize.
“Overall, we’re seeing less snow as winter temperatures warm,” Stampone said. “Winter is actually warming faster than summer temperatures are.”
According to Stampone, the most pronounced changes can be seen at night.
“We’re seeing fewer and fewer of those really cold extremes,” she said, a shift with major implications for snowpack longevity, ecosystems and snowmaking.
Rather than disappearing entirely, winter is contracting. Stampone noted that “a later first snowfall and earlier snow melt” are part of consistent trends, even as day-to-day weather remains volatile. That volatility, she said, is what makes planning so difficult.
Winter tourism impacted by volatility in winter weather
Few sectors are feeling that volatility more acutely than winter tourism. Former New Hampshire department of business and economic affairs commissioner Taylor Caswell described winter recreation as a cornerstone of the state’s rural economy.
“Tourism in New Hampshire in the winter is a major economic driver, particularly in rural areas,” Caswell said.
He estimated that a quarter to a third of meals-and-rooms revenue occurs during the winter months.
However, people’s travel habits in winter have changed. Caswell said instead of booking trips weeks in advance, visitors now wait until the last minute.
“People are choosing when to travel in a much tighter window,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘let’s see what the weather’s going to be, and we’ll decide on Wednesday or Thursday whether to go for a weekend.’ It’s a [great] deal of volatility.”
Caswell added that the risk is even greater for communities dependent on recreational snowmobiling, an industry that relies entirely on natural snowfall.
For students like Dartmouth Club Ski Team captain Andrew Wilson ’26, skiing remains central to winter life at Dartmouth, even as conditions fluctuate.
“I’ve lived in New Hampshire my whole life,” he said. “Skiing is pretty central to the culture of my town back home.”
At Dartmouth, Wilson said that weather variability shapes how and when the team trains, but adaptation is built into the sport.
“The general culture is ‘go with the flow and take whatever you can get,’” Wilson said.
If conditions deteriorate, the team adjusts.
“There are ways you can practice skiing and improve skiing without running gates,” he said. “And if for whatever reason … there was no ability to make snow, we’d just be doing dry land the whole time.”
Ski areas seek to ‘outpace’ climate change with snowmaking technology
New Hampshire’s ski industry has long been an economic engine for the state. The industry generates roughly $500 million in yearly economic output and accounts for roughly 10,000 jobs. Every year, an estimated 2.8 million people visit ski areas in New Hampshire, according to New Hampshire PBS.
So far, ski areas with snowmaking equipment have been able to adapt to less natural snow. Advances in snowmaking technology allow resorts to remain operational even as natural snowfall declines according to New Hampshire PBS.
Wilson said competitive skiing today is almost entirely dependent on man-made snow.
“You need ideally 18 inches of compact snow depth,” he said. “We pretty much never see that with purely natural snow, so pretty much we’re racing exclusively on trails with the [capacity for] snow-making.”
Wilson, who grew up skiing in New Hampshire, said that snowmaking technology “so far” has been able to keep pace with warming.
“Snowmaking technology has pretty much outpaced climate change so far,” he said. “In particular, better guns and more efficient pumps and compressors have developed faster than the temperatures of warming to put more snow on the mountain in a shorter window.”
However, Wilson noted that “snowmaking technology can only progress so far until you run out of water” and that water access is a “limiting factor for all ski areas for snow making.”
This challenge is especially visible at the Dartmouth Skiway, where operations depend on a finite snowmaking pond fed by surface water, according to Dartmouth Skiway general manager Mark Adamczyk.
Adamczyk said that variability has become the defining feature of winter. His ski area is thus in near-constant response mode, he said.
“What that really means for us is that we’re operating 18 hours at a time,” he said, adding that his role entails monitoring weather patterns, snow surfaces and equipment needs.
Adamcyzk noted that snowmaking is central to that effort.
“The future of the Skiway is linked to how well we can make snow and invest in our snowmaking in the future,” Adamczyk said. “Of the Skiway’s 100 skiable acres, 67 are snowmaking-dependent and often the only terrain open.”
As Wilson said above, water availability has become a growing concern. Adamczyk said the Skiway’s pond holds five million gallons, but over the course of a season, they push a little over 30 million gallons through the system in the effort to make snow. During drought conditions, even ideal snowmaking weather can go unused.
“We have periods of time that we have snowmaking windows … but we’re not [making snow] because we’re waiting for the pond to refill,” he said.
Efforts to broaden and diversify mountain economies already underway
As winters continue to warm, resilience may depend less on preserving a single season and more on broadening what mountain economies can offer.
Cawell said diversification is already underway. Ski areas that once sat idle in summer are now hosting mountain biking, weddings, and festivals. “They’re really sort of fighting ways to monetize their facilities year-round,” he said.
Stampone echoed that approach, encouraging communities to plan for “the contraction of the season” while finding opportunities in warmer months.
But she warned that long-term planning still lags behind climate reality.
“Not all governments consider [climate projections] in their planning,” she said, calling it one of the biggest gaps in preparedness.
For Adamczyk, the challenge ahead is financial as much as environmental.
“A new lift is $5, $6 million dollars now,” he said. “And it’s very expensive to maintain old lifts.”
