If current climate trends continue, the Winter Olympics will have only one place to go.
Towering Squaw Peak has groomed generations of America’s most elite winter Olympians, from racer Tamara McKinney and freestylist Jonny Mosely to six members of this year’s Alpine Team USA.
“It is one of the more vulnerable locations to climate change,” said Waterloo researcher Natalie Knowles, a former Truckee resident and ski racer who now investigates the impact of global warming on winter sports. By the end of the century, if the pace of global warming continues, only one former host venue — the mountainous northern Japanese city of Sapporo — will have enough snow to host the Winter Games.
Once planned, the Olympics can’t be cancelled. But it’s hard to deploy a contingency plan. In 1980, Lake Placid staffers shoveled truckloads of snow onto barren cross-country ski trails. Vancouver airlifted buckets of snow on artificial moguls made of hay bales. In the southern Russia resort city of Sochi, , skiers landed in puddles.
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