Do the Math: The Great Salt Lake and Your Season Pass

The Great Salt Lake sits somewhere around 4,191 feet of elevation as I write this. The people who study it say it needs to be at about 4,198 to be considered healthy. I'm going to explain, in plain English and with no agenda except that I love skiing here, what that number means for the next twenty years of your season pass.

First, the part of the legend that's true. When a cold northwest storm crosses the lake, it picks up moisture and heat off that open water and unloads it on the Wasatch. It's not most of our snow — the ski-resort brochures oversell it — but it's a real fraction, and it's biggest in exactly the setups that produce the days you tell stories about. The lake doesn't make our winters. It makes our best mornings better.

Second, the part nobody puts on a brochure. A shrinking lake exposes lakebed, and lakebed becomes dust, and dust ends up on the spring snowpack. Dark snow absorbs sun. The pack melts earlier and faster. You've seen it — that brown layer that surfaces in April like a ring in a bathtub. Less lake means more dust means shorter seasons, independent of how much it snows.

Third, the only optimistic sentence available: this is a plumbing problem. The lake is low mostly because water that would reach it gets used upstream. Plumbing problems have valves. That makes this fixable in a way that global problems aren't, which is not nothing.

I'm not going to tell you what to do about it. We make sweatshirts. But pay attention to it the way you pay attention to the avalanche forecast — as a real number about a real thing that decides what kind of winter you get. When water shows up on a ballot here, vote like a skier.

The lake is dying. The snow comes off the lake. Do the math. Skiing in Utah is not a permanent fact. It's a thing we're currently being allowed to do.