Powder Power
THERE WAS A time when Colorado winters began in September. Storms arrived with the regularity of exasperated mothers, slamming through the foothills overnight and leaving bluebird mornings glittering with fresh powder. In my neighborhood, the season’s first snowstorm was its own small ceremony: kids slipping out in sneakers with bald treads to slide around the unplowed asphalt; adults excavating shovels or cursing snowblowers that hadn’t been touched since April. Snowmaking guns, even at the fanciest resorts, sat idle—embarrassing, almost, in the face of winter’s self-sufficiency.
Back then, the peaks kept their whites year-round, veils dropping all the way to the valley floor. We believed winter could take care of herself. And she did. Now she arrives like a transfer student long after the semester has begun—November, if we’re lucky.
Snow holds memory the way the subconscious does: in layers. If you know how to read it, the record is plain.
Early season now stretches across too many cloudless forty-degree days. Whispers circulate—worst December in twenty years—as lessons are canceled, and resorts post strategic crops on social media to catfish the thin cover. In-bounds snowpack grows from the bottom up: fragile facets forming a man-made hoar layer, a kind of rot beneath a cosmetic surface. The “white ribbon of death,” once a joke about the East Coast, is no longer a punchline. Even the ribbon frays.
C., one of my favorite students, arrived as she always does—on time, in her red jacket that flashes against the high-alpine white like a cardinal. This year, the “white” was more aspiration than fact. Roped-off fields of rock barred her favorite lines. She made the best of it until the disappointment began to show. Surveying the sad bumps under E Chair, she sighed as if looking at something spoiled.
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…” she sang, mostly to herself, mostly out of boredom.
But the atmosphere seemed to hear her. A quick shake of flurries answered. On the next lap she tried again; the sky obliged with another faint shimmer. By the following day, the pattern repeated. We decided, unscientifically but happily, that she was communing with the weather. A mythology emerged: part Norse, part Disney. Ullr missing. Elsa calling him back. Their reunion would bring the storm.
We never named the villain.
February has been a string of weak systems, freeze–thaw cycles, and long dry spells that gnaw at an already-thin base. Weak layers fester—a design for failure. South-facing slopes reveal brush and talus. The mountains show their bones.
Then Presidents’ Weekend arrives, and with it, a shift. From Texas—far from our altitude—Elsa must have sung. Three days of heavy squalls follow, warm and wet. For the first time this winter, the stake measures in feet. It is not champagne powder; it drops dense and rimed, wind-loaded into slabs with an attitude. But it is snow. Riders pour into bowls and chutes, churning the thick stuff with a joy that overrides texture. Laughter skims across the ridgelines.
My client, A.B., and I spent the weekend threading tree lines, hunting pockets that the wind hadn’t touched. He’s a San Diego skier with the agility of a chamois—compact, quick, and unbothered by pitch. Over two winters, he’s shifted from guest to friend. On Monday we went looking for what the storm had hidden.
Beneath the still-roped-off Snow White, we found it: a few preserved turns, shaded and crisp, the kind of untouched snow that feels like a promise kept. We lapped it three times. The sound of our turns—soft, cohesive—felt like calligraphy laid gently across the slope. We started calling the pocket “Grandmother’s House,” a small domestic refuge carved into the chaos.
On our last run, another skier dropped in from above, eyeing a jump.
“How’s the landing?” he asked.
“Good,” we called back. “But give us a second—we’re right below it.”
He waited, then sent a front flip, landing low but solid. When he stood, snow dusting his shoulders, he grinned.
“Built it myself,” he said. Then, spotting the logo on my coat: “Don’t tell patrol.”
“We won’t.”
People love powder for the way it frees the body and lightens the mind. But powder is also instruction. A verb, not a noun. And in this instructive sense, the kidnapper in C.’s story isn’t mythic at all. It’s us—our carbon, our appetite, our insistence that winter bend to our timelines and our business models.
Avalanche forecasters read the snowpack like scripture: each storm a sentence, each crust a warning. A buried surface hoar layer is a velvet snare. A warm storm atop cold facets is a house built on marbles. They remind us that snow speaks a language available to anyone willing to listen. And right now, its message is inseparable from the one carried downstream by shrinking rivers.
Maybe we understood this intuitively as children: snowmaking was a sign of failure, not progress. Longer seasons mean more lift tickets, yes—but cost water, energy, and the illusion that the mountain owes us abundance. If we want snowfall to outlive us, stewardship must follow awe.
It doesn’t require grand gestures. Start with stories told on chairlifts, in lessons, in the quiet decisions that shape future winters. Start by admitting that nature will give as long as we stop insisting she give more. That the ribbon of death is not inevitable. That C.’s cardinal jacket should not be the brightest red on the mountain.
And when the dry spells stretch longer—as they will—we must not treat them as prophecy. We must resist the idea that winter is slipping away into artificial domes in New Jersey and Dubai. The mountains are not done. Winter knows how to return once we let her.
Somewhere, a lone cardinal sings.
Let it snow.