Can skiing survive on a warming planet?

By Simon Willis

You know why I have this in the car?” asked Mikko Martikainen, clutching a penknife. “So if we hit a reindeer, I can get out and kill it.” It was a foggy morning in late November, and Martikainen and I were driving through the forests of Lapland in northern Finland, dodging reindeer grazing on the verges. We were headed to a small ski resort near Rovaniemi, a city bang on the Arctic Circle that is the centre of Finland’s winter-tourism industry. According to legend, Father Christmas lives there.

“It didn’t used to be like this,” Martikainen said, staring through the windscreen wipers of his white 4x4. We were approaching the Santa Claus Holiday Village on the outskirts of town, a complex of peaked-roof wooden buildings flogging Christmas tat. The only thing interrupting the festive vibe was the weather: it was about 2℃ and a soft, grey drizzle was descending. What little snow there was lay in dispiriting patches of slush.