Jan
13
A Snowboarder's Guide to Climate Change
A few years ago, Jeremy Jones was cutting up one of his favorite runs down a glacier in Chamonix, the legendary French ski area high in the Aiguilles Rouges mountains. Jones has been a regular at this spot for the last 15 years, coming for a few weeks every winter to hone the skills that have made him one of the world’s leading big mountain snowboarders. But on this occasion, he did something he doesn’t often do: stop short. The glacier, he said, had receded a few hundred yards up the valley, effectively chopping off the end of his run. “That’s kind of a drastic deal,” he told me, and not because he was bummed about losing the powder: “Glaciers aren’t supposed to move that fast.”