The environmental impacts of skiing and snowboarding?

Answer 1

There are several direct and indirect impacts from skiing. I'll just list a few and hopefully others will add some more.

1. Building at High Altitude
Ski areas ten to be at relatively high altitudes. This might mean 4000 feet in Vermont or 12000 feet in New Mexico, but high relative to the region. This has a disproportionate impact on watersheds as everyone is downstream of pollution.

Furthermore, high altitude ecosystems tend to be more fragile and recover slowly, so there can be greater impacts on wildlife and vegetation by the mere presence of people. Animals in their weakened winter state being disrupted by people is a major concern. Considerations of impacts on black bears was a major stumbling block for development at Killington for many year. With respect to vegetation that grows slowly at altitude, skiers who are skiing the trees and cutting up vegetation can have a negative impact as well.

Habitat fractioning. Again, but building at altitude, far from where people would build if not for the ski area, you put roads, driveways and other manmade obstacles that divide up habitat, force animals to cross through traffic and have other effects.

Finally, high altitude often means visible from a long distance, so there are major visual impacts. I love to ski and have skied all my life, but ski areas leave a terrible scar on a mountain.

2. Snowmaking
Watersheds have reduced flow in winter and often the watersheds near ski areas, because they are near the source, have low flows. So drawing off water to make snow can cause disproportionate damage to riparian (riverbank) habitats. This is why ski areas are often forced to build large lagoons to mitigate these problems, but there's not getting around the fact that drawing that much water from a small source has impacts (as does drinking bottled spring water - always buy filtered water, not spring water if you care about environmental impacts).

3. Carbon Outputs.
Ski lifts, resort lodges and all that take a lot of energy. Snowmaking is the king - when I was patrolling at Sugarbush and they brought the new snowmaking compressors online, the surge blew lines off the poles and blacked out the whole valley! Finally, people drive, or worse, fly long distances to skiing quite often, so that leads to a major carbon output.

There are others. If you want greener alternatives to resort skiing, try backcountry skiing or boarding in one of its many forms. Obviously, some of the impacts remain (you're still driving, you're still buying gear), but it reduces the environmental and financial cost of the sport considerably.

Don't get me wrong, I will continue to ski and teach at resorts, and the primary reason I prefer backcountry skiing is because I just love being the backcountry and would prefer it if everyone else stayed at the resorts! But since you asked about impacts....