Almost every year, winter’s most dedicated aficionados meet with wooden toboggans on the hill above Eagles Mere Lake in rural Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, to barrel down an icy track onto the frozen water below.
The slide is a long held tradition in this corner of Pennsylvania. Since 1904 (the first year the slide was built), thousands of people have travelled to the town of Eagles Mere to zip down the more than 1,000-foot slide. The tradition is even part of my own family history: my grandparents’ first date was on a toboggan in Eagles Mere, a place they would later bring their own children.
But climate change threatens to end the toboggan slide for good. The last time there was a winter cold enough to freeze the lake so that it could bear the weight of a heavy toboggan was in 2014, more than a decade ago.
This is something many places with winter traditions are now contending with as cold weather becomes a thing of the past.
In Alaska, for example, the famed Iditarod sled dog race has seen a dip in the number of participants because the route is getting more challenging with less snow, creating obstacles like exposed tree trunks or muddy paths that mushers have to navigate around. In Minnesota, the ice fishing season has been shortened or canceled altogether because the lakes aren’t freezing over thick enough.
In cold places like Alaska or Minnesota or Pennsylvania, snow and ice are a fundamental identity. While some people might groan about the discomfort of below-zero weather, the activities that come with it make winters something to celebrate. But with every year that passes without these activities, the local culture changes.
To some degree, this cultural change is inevitable, even welcome. Traditions and norms have always morphed with the changing times: the Pennsylvania I know today is certainly not the same Pennsylvania my grandparents knew 70 years ago. But it’s an entirely different story when it’s the weather that forces this cultural change.
And right now, we’re living in a time of unprecedented weather. Not since the last interglacial period more than 100,000 years ago have we seen average global temperatures this hot (2024 is predicted to be the hottest year on record, beating 2023, the other hottest year on record).
But unlike the last interglacial period, this time humans are the cause of all this heat – and it’s getting hotter at record speed. Minnesota’s winters, for example, have warmed 13 times faster over the last 50 years than their summers. Centuries-old activities like ice fishing are disappearing in less than one human lifetime because of it.
When I was in Pennsylvania for Christmas just a couple weeks ago, I hiked to a waterfall near my dad’s house. The trail was covered with several inches of snow, and long icicles had formed on the rocks that surrounded the falls.
As we trekked back to the car, we caught up to a family with three young children, all decked out in snow pants and mittens. They cackled with glee as they launched snowballs at one another. The youngest child, no more than two years old, waddled slowly behind everyone else, pausing every so often to dip his mitten into the fluffy snow and bring it to his mouth.
At the rate global warming is going, this winter could be the coldest one this little boy ever experiences. I hope his family took some photos.
I know many people from wintry places who take pride in the cold identity of their home. Without winter, what does a once-cold place become?
