After Snow seeks to understand the ski resort as a human-designed landscape on the brink of ecological and cultural collapse. This research uses design to reimagine futures for the alpine ecologies — not as privatized, extractive enclaves, but as a public terrain.
It probably won't come as a surprise that winter is fading. In the Alps (pictured above), the snow-inundated winters that fuel a world-renowned outdoor industry are growing scarce, leaving alpine landscapes that typically accumulate six to seven feet seasonally barren. In the not-so-distant future, winter as we know it may cease to exist: the landscape conditions that materially define skiing are unraveling — melting, and being simultaneously reengineered to simulate what no longer naturally falls.
Skiing has long been romanticized as a sport synonymous with escaping to a pristine "natural" world. After Snow argues the opposite: resorts like Telluride, Colorado are highly engineered — shaped through landforming and technical infrastructure into landscapes intelligently disguised as permanent. They are not neutral ground. The commodified terrain they occupy is shaped by the very infrastructures, and corporate overtakings, that have prolonged their existence.
Telluride was selected as the primary case for the research of After Snow, breaking the issues down into three scales: Climate, the disappearing raw material; Cultural, the question of who ends up holding the mountain as climate risk mounts; and Landscape, the physical response of regraded terrain, cleared forest, and diverted water. Read together, they describe a designed landscape whose logic is failing under the mounting pressures of global climate change, precipitation loss, and temperature rise.
Climate change is causing measurably less snow. Zooming out, Telluride is just one node in a global network of ski resorts facing the same collapse. In the Rockies, Sierra Nevada, and Alps alike, snowfall is becoming erratic and insufficient — a recent projection shows that by 2100, nearly every major mountain region will lose measurable snowpack, and 13% of resorts will have no snow at all. Expanding into higher elevations is now a widespread mitigation tactic, chasing colder microclimates to buy time. But this vertical migration is finite. The mountain ends.
Ski resorts are consolidating into corporate megaliths in response to climate change and deregulation. Mega-resort monopolies like Vail Resorts, POWDR, and Alterra now dominate the global ski market — a strategy of consolidation that protects profits from climate volatility while doubling down on snowmaking infrastructure. Resorts that experience several consecutive low-snow years are likely to be bought out by these holding companies, further concentrating the ski landscape into fewer owner hands.
Artificial snow is changing alpine soil. In the face of climate limits, the industry has leaned into increasingly technical solutions — snowmaking, once a stopgap, is now standard. It requires an extensive network of underground pipes, pumping stations, electrical infrastructure, and storage reservoirs, plus massive water withdrawals. The snow it produces is five times denser than natural snow, slower to melt, and settles onto ecologically devoid soils. Combined with grooming machinery, it compacts soil, disrupts plant succession, and delays spring regrowth.
France is roughly a generation ahead of the American Rockies on the closure curve, which makes it the clearest available picture of what an unplanned retreat leaves on the ground. Closure is not the end of the infrastructure. When a resort stops running, the machinery stays — towers, cable, haul rope, pylon footings — and beneath it the military, industrial and forestry waste of a century: barbed wire, fencing, old equipment, slowly degrading some of the richest wild terrain in Europe.
This is the argument for designing the exit rather than defaulting into it. Terrain that will not hold snow will be given up either way; the question is whether it is dismantled and remediated, or simply switched off.
The Guardian — as the snow retreats, France's ski lifts are left standing →
In the not-so-distant future, winter as we know it may cease to exist. Across alpine regions — from the Alps to the Rockies — the winter landscapes that once defined skiing are unraveling: melting, and simultaneously reengineered to simulate what no longer naturally falls.
This project positions the ski resort as a designed landscape on the brink — both culturally and ecologically. Skiing has long been romanticized as an escape to a pristine natural world. But resorts like Telluride are highly engineered, shaped through landforming and technical infrastructure to construct landscapes intentionally designed to read as culturally significant. Today's ski resorts are not neutral grounds — they are constructed, commodified terrains shaped by artificial snowmaking, leveled slopes, and corporate consolidation. Nowhere is this more visible than in Telluride, Colorado, where ski culture overlays a deeper history of mineral extraction, privatization, and Indigenous erasure.
As the industry shifts from natural to artificial snow, and from independent operations to global monopolies, After Snow reclaims the ski mountain as a site of public potential — not as a playground for the privileged, but as a zone of cultural refusal and ecological repair.
It probably won't come as a surprise that winter is fading. In the Alps, the snow-inundated winters that fuel a world-renowned outdoor industry are growing scarce, leaving alpine landscapes that typically accumulate six to seven feet seasonally barren. Skiing is a multibillion-dollar industry across the globe, and the raw material it is built on is going away.
The loss is not evenly distributed. Some ranges are being hit harder, and faster, than others. A recent projection shows that by 2100 nearly every major mountain region will lose measurable snowpack — 13% of resorts will have no snow at all. Telluride, Colorado is located in the Southern Rockies and will face one of the most extreme losses of snowpack and winter moisture within this mountain region — exposing it to a range of environmental issues beyond fewer skiable days, like forest fires, drought, and more invasive species.
Expanding into higher elevations is now a widespread mitigation tactic, chasing colder microclimates to buy time. But this vertical migration is finite. The mountain ends.
For a place so tied to its winter economy, Telluride is experiencing some of the most intense measurable effects of climate change in Colorado. Snow arrives later, melts earlier, and fluctuates wildly in quality and volume. What was once a four-month season is now compressed, unpredictable, and often reliant on artificial coverage — average skiable days have declined by nearly 20% over the past three decades.
The satellite record makes the loss legible. Each pair below is the same calendar window, five years apart, over the resort's permit boundary.
Snowmaking, once considered a stopgap, is now standard. It requires an extensive network of underground pipes, pumping stations, electrical infrastructure, and storage reservoirs — not to mention massive water withdrawals from a basin already running short.
Its impact on alpine ecology is silent. Artificial snow is five times denser than natural snow. Its weight compacts the soil beneath it and it melts far later into the spring, shifting soil chemistry and stalling alpine plant succession. And because snowcats have to reach and groom that snow, the terrain below is cleared and regraded flat — compounding the compaction with a permanent change to the ground itself.
The machinery is older than the crisis it now props up. The first commercial snowmaking machine was built in 1950 by three engineers — Art Hunt, Dave Richey, and Wayne Pierce — who rigged a paint-spray compressor, a nozzle, and a garden hose into a snow cannon, blowing water droplets into freezing air. The principle came from Canadian researcher Ray Ringer, who had accidentally made snow crystals in the early 1940s while studying rime ice on jet engines. The Hunt-Richey-Pierce design was patented in 1954 and first used commercially at Grossinger's Catskill Resort in 1952; by the 1980 Lake Placid Games, an Olympics ran on manufactured snow for the first time. The lance towers standing on Telluride's runs today descend directly from that cannon.
A small independent operator cannot survive several back-to-back seasons of terrible snowpack. So they fold into a larger corporate portfolio — one that can spread its gains, and its losses, across a geographically and climatically diverse set of mountains. Mega-resort monopolies like Vail Resorts, POWDR, and Alterra now dominate the global market; nearly 40% of North America's ski areas have been bought out, largely within the last ten years.
The corporatization of skiing has made the sport financially inaccessible, exploded real-estate speculation in small isolated ski towns like Telluride, and fueled the mass expansion of artificial snowmaking. Telluride is on the list of resorts predicted to be acquired next: a few consecutive bad snow years could resituate it from its current individual-owner model to just another asset in a corporate skiing portfolio.
In the last week of December 2025, Telluride's mayor pro-tem Meehan Fee and Mountain Village mayor Marti Prohaska flew to California and offered owner Chuck Horning $127.5 million for 51% of Telluride Ski and Golf, backed by community-focused investors — roughly thirteen times the resort's estimated annual earnings, against a mountain he bought in 2005 for about $45 million. The deal looked live until the draft contract surfaced publicly and the ski company shut it down.
Telluride's ski area is a private business operating on a largely public mountain. The terrain is National Forest, held under a federal Special Use Permit that runs to February 2044. The snow is made partly with the town of Telluride's water and the rest with Mountain Village's. The lift that reaches it was built with public money. The people who run it live in the valley. Everything about the mountain is already collective except the decision-making.
The last two winters made the cost of that arrangement legible: a resort closed at Christmas over patrol wages, a snowmaking dispute settled by threatening not to make snow, an owner who did not show up to his own council update. Every one of those is a governance failure, not a snow problem — and none of them are fixable by a community that has no seat at the table.
Public and community ownership is not hypothetical here — it has already been drafted. Ski areas already operate as municipal departments, nonprofits, and cooperatives across North America, and a number of that size sits within reach of the same public financing tools towns routinely use for water systems, transit, and land. Acquisition would let the valley do what no private owner has an incentive to do: stop leaning on continuous real-estate development to prop up a profit model that a shortening winter has already destabilized, and manage the mountain for the two centuries after skiing rather than the next transaction.
Telluride is nestled in a high-altitude box canyon in the southwest corner of the state. With just 2,700 permanent residents, its dramatic setting and global destination status often obscure its layered history of mineral extraction. Once a fertile hunting ground stewarded by the Navajo and Ute tribes, it was colonized in 1875 in the name of gold.
Even its very name — derived from tellurium, a metalloid found attached to gold — signals that Telluride was built on speculative value. And when the mines finally closed in the 1960s due to failing markets and supply, snow became the new gold.
Miners turned venture capitalists converted ranch and Forest Service land into navigable terrain, initiating Telluride's transformation into a winter destination. While it was not originally designed for the ultra-wealthy, the unchecked expansion of real estate — now the primary profit model for most ski resorts — slowly reshaped the town into the exclusive and often unlivable enclave it is today.
Telluride's transformation from dirt streets to designer stores was only possible by the boom and doom of the land practices that came before. Though the resort operates largely on public land under a 40-year Special Use Permit from the U.S. Forest Service, issued in 2004 and set to expire in 2044, its day-to-day experience is defined by intense privatization — a landscape governed by technical systems rather than ecological processes, where ownership and extraction are prioritized over care and repair.
See Forever is the spine of the resort — the ridge run that carries skiers from the gondola at the top of Lift 7 down through Lifts 9, 6, 14 and 15 to the valley floor. It is also the resort's most heavily engineered ground: the trail sits inside a braid of snowmaking mains, hydrants and grooming corridors, drawn here against the terraced cuts and fills that hold them.
The three strategies that follow — Frame, Filter, Foil — are tested along this line.
Click each to expand.
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A presentation on the future of skiing followed by a panel on "the cost of doing nothing," featuring local recreation stakeholders and EcoAction Partners on our current climate.
Thanks to the Peter Walker & Partners Fellowship, this research is continuing beyond After Snow. The fellowship is funding a set of comparative cases alongside Telluride, Colorado — strengthening the argument that alpine landscapes are shifting quietly and unevenly across the globe, and surfacing what communities in each place are doing to slow that retreat.
Alaska's alpine terrain sits inside a different ownership logic than Telluride's private resort model: vast tracts of ski-adjacent land remain under military jurisdiction, layered with Indigenous claims and federal land management. Where After Snow argues for prying open a privatized mountain into public commons, Alaska's militarized zones raise the inverse question — what happens when access is foreclosed not by capital, but by defense infrastructure? The case traces how national security designations restrict recreation, complicate stewardship, and produce their own version of an inaccessible alpine landscape.
Across the Alps, resorts and glacier operators now blanket snowfields in reflective geotextiles each summer, slowing melt to protect both glacier ice and the artificial snow base beneath it. Unlike Telluride's snowmaking infrastructure, which manufactures winter after the fact, blanketing tries to preserve what's already there — a more literal, physical act of stewardship, but one still built on continuous capital investment rather than systemic change. As this practice expands to North America, it offers a instructive counterpoint to After Snow's proposed strategies: can conservation-by-preservation coexist with, or does it forestall, the deeper redesign the thesis calls for?
At Steamboat and elsewhere, resorts have begun running snowguns outside of ski season to lay down protective moisture ahead of wildfire fronts — repurposing the same machines critiqued in After Snow as an artifact of dissonant adaptation. This case examines the logic in reverse: instead of retooling snowmaking for ecological repair, resorts are retooling it for asset protection. It's a useful test of the thesis's core claim — that snowmaking infrastructure, once built, can be redirected toward public or ecological ends rather than purely private ones.
What began as an experiment more than fifteen years ago is now routine: Davos stores a mound of snow through the summer on the Flüela Pass road and reopens a four-kilometer cross-country trail by the end of October, weeks before winter arrives. It is the clearest working example of treating snow as a stored resource rather than a seasonal delivery — a reservoir, managed like water.
Snow fences on wind-exposed ridges decelerate winter storms, forcing blowing snow to deposit into concentrated drifts — "whales" — that groomers then reposition. No energy, no water withdrawal; the wind does the work.
Automated guns run only during peak cold, when water-to-snow conversion is most efficient, building dense artificial piles. The crystals are far denser than natural flakes, and the lower surface-area-to-volume ratio resists melting.
At twenty to thirty feet, the mound is sealed. The traditional method is a twelve-inch layer of wood chips or sawdust — cheap, excellent thermal insulation.
Premium operations use multi-layered technical fabric: a reflective white outer face bouncing solar radiation, a porous inner core letting evaporating moisture escape while keeping warm summer rain out of the pack.
For After Snow, snow farming is the most honest version of mitigation on offer: it accepts scarcity and manages a shrinking resource deliberately, rather than manufacturing an unlimited supply on demand. It also concedes the argument — a season that has to be stored over the summer is no longer a climate, it is an inventory.
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Cory Page holds a dual master's degree in landscape architecture and urban planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). His work examines shifting landscapes shaped by climate volatility, material flows, and evolving cultural practices — using snow as an entry point into broader questions of environmental instability, resource management, and design's role in adaptation.
As the 2025 Peter Walker & Partners Fellow at the GSD, Cory's research builds on his thesis, After Snow, which reimagines the ski resort as a public terrain for ecological and spatial remediation. Set in his hometown of Telluride, Colorado, the work extends toward comparative research in the Alps, Andes, and arid urban regions of Mexico.
Cory is a Lead Designer at Polistudio, an interdisciplinary planning and design practice in Mexico City focused on adaptive reuse and urban regeneration.