El-Meanie-O: the bully of winter

As published in MapleLine Magazine: Nov.4, 2009

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by Kurtis Gramchuk

If you're one of "those" people you started counting down the days till the next snowfall, right after your last day on the hill. This year however, you may find yourself waiting a little longer. Environment Canada has predicted that this year will be an El Niño winter – not such great news for those of you who have already started pulling out your gear, waiting ever so patiently for mother nature to start producing her magic powder and covering the mountains in a white blanket of pure bliss.

Since 1950, 17 El Niño winters have been recorded. Of those, 15 have brought much warmer temperatures to North America, yielding less snow fall than normally expected – that’s the last thing you want to have happen if you’re craving the powder and can’t wait to wax up and get riding. But what exactly is an El Niño and what does it do?

El Niño is a large area of warm water found in the central Pacific Ocean that tends to make an appearance every few years by blowing strong warm winds off the ocean; those winds cause warm wet air to seep in and spread itself all over North America, creating above-normal temperatures also known as the “hot tub” effect. In the fall, El Niño can be a good thing as it strips storm clouds off their top layer and renders them less powerful, helping to keep the tropical storms found in the Caribbean and North America at bay.

Winter is when you can really see the effects of this strange weather formation – December throughout February is when El Niño is at its strongest, wrecking havoc on mountain areas causing snowfall (that should be falling in mass quantities) to become nothing more than a light dusting. On the west coast, our mountains tend to be at such high elevations that an El Niño winter will have little or no effect, in terms of snowfall, and giving non-winter people a taste of spring-like temperatures; but as history has shown us, this is not always the case. Does anyone remember January 2005 when Mount Washington had to close due to the lack of snow after only being open for a short time?

With an already incredibly slow economic market in full effect, a light-snowfall winter is the last thing we need to have happen for tourism and sports-related businesses that count on the snow in order to make a living. Closing down our local ski area, Mount Washington, would be devastating – not only to the people who make their retail or service-sector livelihood based on snow sports, but for snow fans who yearly make the trip in search of that perfect powder stash for skiing – or for those of you who enjoy many of the other winter activities such as snowboarding and tubing that Mount Washington has to offer. Not to mention the impact that lessened snowfall will have on the 2010 Olympic Winter Games being held in Whistler, British Columbia during Feb.12-28 (Paralympics during Mar.12-21).

Let’s not start putting away that new gear just yet, but it might not hurt to say a little prayer to the ‘snow gods’ either. MM

Kurtis Gramchuk is with Community One Clothing and Footwear, 6703 West Coast Road, Sooke.

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This article was first published on page 26 in MapleLine Magazine (Holiday 2009 issue / Nov.09-Jan.10).