In the heart of Texas, at A&M University, stands an unlikely, manmade ski slope with artificial snow called Mt. Aggie. Unsurprisingly, the hill is the only place to ski within about 1,000 miles.
First constructed in the early 1970s, Mt. Aggie allowed students to ski even during the warmest months—or at least it did until this past November when a windstorm damaged it.
University fundraising is underway to repair the slope, which, according to Texas A&M Today, will require "replacing the plywood with cement, reshaping the mountain and adding all-new surface material."
The planned repairs won't come cheap. To get Mt. Aggie back in working order, the university hopes to raise $800,000.
Since Mt. Aggie's inception, it has hosted kinesiology courses, birthday parties, and other celebrations. Some A&M students credit it as the place where they first learned to ski.
At this point, the artificial ski slope is a time-honored, distinctly human tradition. If anything, we can't resist constructing monuments that, in their own ways, are an affront to Mother Nature. There's the massive freezer inside New Jersey's American Dream mall, the powerplant turned turf-slope CopenHill in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Des Moines, Iowa's burgeoning Sleepy Hollow hill—to name a few.
These hills, perhaps treated mostly as novelty by hardcore skiers when compared to their alpine counterparts, take on greater significance if couched in the broader climate change conversation. A gloomy, hopefully avoidable version of the future exists where skiing only occurs on artificial snow and inside comically large freezers.
I—like you, probably— hope it doesn't come to that. I don't need to convince you that skiing the way God intended beats the artificial alternative. It raises the question, though: Would skiing be worthwhile without real snow?
I'm not sure. Having grown up obsessed with the sport, I'd struggle to give it up, even if it meant my average summer day looked like this, followed by an exciting and exotic ski vacation to a New Jersey Mall.
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