The hottest new winter sport is about to get even hotter

Over the past few winters, where I live — in one of the country’s winter sport meccas — there have been a whole lot more people packing skins and stepping into the backcountry. 

Trails once quiet, save for the sinuous whoosh of a lone ski line, are suddenly dotted with fresh tracks. Backcountry skiing — long a niche pursuit of hardcore alpinists and telemark nostalgists — has spilled into the mainstream.

And now, the world’s most elite athletes are bringing the culture to the grandest stage of all: Ski mountaineering — “skimo” — makes its Olympic debut at the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina. It’s the first time in almost three decades that the Winter Olympics have added a new sport — one that grew up out of the same terrain that pulled so many of us away from ski lifts and into tree glades and untracked bowls.

At the Olympics, a select field of just 36 athletes — 18 men and 18 women — will compete today across three medal events: men’s sprint, women’s sprint, and a mixed-gender relay. Competitors will climb and descend steep alpine terrain on ultra-light gear that’s about as stripped down as a ski setup gets, racing up with “skins” on their skis and ripping down through technical passages in incredible, breathless bursts.

This surge in backcountry and skimo’s Olympic arrival feels like the pinnacle of an overlooked aspect of mountain culture that I’m intimately familiar with. But as more people fall for the draw of snow-covered landscapes and independent lines, climate change keeps chipping away at the very winters that make this lifestyle possible.

A surge in popularity 

I first started skiing uphill six years ago, when many other people did — just as the pandemic hit. Obvious things were driving me away from traditional ski culture: the surprising cost of resort days and season passes, the drama of holiday weekend lift lines (or lift lines on any day, these days), and the soul-crushing traffic of traditional ski culture. Skiing had become, paradoxically, too crowded, too exclusive, and just had too much baggage for a lot of people.  

Several years before that, I fell in love with cross-country skiing — let’s just say, the dorkier, clumsier version of touring in the woods. I discovered I could access some of the same hiking trails I loved in the warmer months, as well as snowed-over Forest Service access roads, and ski for miles and miles — often without seeing anyone — with my dogs and friends.

As I pushed into more variable terrain, I needed more capable equipment, and eventually quickly found my way to backcountry skiing, too. And I’m not alone.

Across the US, backcountry skiing participation has soared. Industry data show that in the 2021-22 winter season, participation in “alpine touring” — the technical discipline most synonymous with backcountry skiing — jumped impressively compared with previous years. Splitboarding, the snowboard equivalent, grew sharply as well. These gains were far stronger than growth in resort alpine skiing and snowboarding.

Backcountry’s popularity has been fueled by a complex mix: more affordable and capable gear, a growing culture of skill-sharing and safety education, and a collective craving for space and serenity that resorts can’t always provide. Trails and faces that once felt exclusive are now familiar to a generation that grew up with Instagram and started exploring their own hills during pandemic lockdowns.

But for all that momentum, it’s worth tackling the obvious question: What exactly is backcountry skiing — and what is skimo?

At its simplest, backcountry skiing is just skiing outside of controlled resort boundaries. There are no lifts, no groomed runs, and no snowmaking cannons. What draws people out of bounds is the promise of untouched snow, dynamic terrain, and a drive to “earn your turns” — climbing up so you can hit those wild, unserviced downhill runs.

Backcountry skiing also carries a reality that no Olympic spotlight can soften: it is inherently risky. Outside resort boundaries, there are no avalanche-controlled slopes, no ski patrol, no marked hazards. Skiers are responsible for reading terrain, assessing snowpack stability, checking weather patterns, and making conservative decisions in complex, shifting conditions. Avalanche education and companion rescue training isn’t optional — most experienced backcountry travelers take formal avalanche courses, practice rescue drills with beacons, probes, and shovels, and spend seasons learning how wind, temperature swings, and storm layers interact to create hidden instabilities.

Even with lots of education, the margin for error is thin. Avalanches kill dozens of people in North America each winter, many of them experienced recreationists. Just this week, a massive slide in Lake Tahoe trapped 15 backcountry skiers; nine are still missing. The growth of backcountry participation has brought more education and awareness — but also more exposure. Every skin tour is, in some sense, a negotiation with uncertainty.

In skimo — or ski mountaineering — the Olympic format you’ll see this winter, athletes race uphill sections with lightweight skis and skins, sometimes transitioning on foot, before shedding those skins and skiing down as fast as possible. It’s part endurance sport, part technical descent, and rooted in a tradition that goes back to alpine military patrols in the early 20th century.

At the Olympics, skimo’s format is intense and immediate: sprint events that pack ascents and descents into a few minutes of fierce effort and a mixed relay that pits pairs of men and women against alpine terrain with speed and precision. 

It’s a spectacle and a feat of human athleticism — but what I see is a beginning of an end.

The fastest-growing winter sport is also the most vulnerable

The irony — and the tragedy — is that we’re falling in love with these wild places at the very moment the climate that sustains them is changing.

We know that climate change is not just an abstract threat. Already, it’s reshaping where and how we have winters at all and upending entire cultures and lifestyles in the process. Studies commissioned by climate institutes and the International Olympic Committee show that, under current emissions scenarios, the number of places in the world that can reliably host winter sports like skiing will shrink dramatically over the coming decades. 

Projections indicate that by the mid-2050s, a large share of existing Winter Olympic sites may not meet the temperature and snow-reliability requirements for competition, and the pool of viable hosts could narrow to just a fraction of today’s list.

At the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, artificial snow has become an essential part of staging the event. Entire landscapes in northern Italy have been scaffolded with machines to cover competition slopes as natural snowfall proves unreliable — a technological workaround that consumes significant water and energy and underscores how tenuous winter conditions have become.

In the Western US, where I live, communities that have long depended on consistent snowpack for tourism, water storage, and local economies are confronting record warm winters and snow droughts. Snow surveys in Colorado, Utah, and Oregon have shown historically low snowpack in recent seasons, with far-reaching implications for water supplies, wildfire risk, and outdoor recreation economies.

The ski industry remains big business — for now. North America alone welcomed more than 61 million lift visitors in the 2024-25 season, and resorts continue to invest hundreds of millions in summer counter-programming (think alpine slides, zip lines, mountain biking runs) and infrastructure like new lifts and snowmaking systems. But these investments are a hedge against a future that is already proving to be increasingly variable. Resorts are doubling down on snowmaking and comfort amenities while wild snow becomes less predictable. These adaptations may buy time but don’t guarantee winters as we’ve known them.

In backcountry terrain, the stakes are even more visceral. There are no snowguns and no groomers — just skin tracks leading up, and hopes of pow turns on the way down. It’s profoundly human in scale, and it’s the reason the sport feels like a return to something elemental. Yet that very purity is vulnerable to a warming climate that is shortening snow seasons, elevating rain-on-snow events that cause rapid melting of existing snowpack, and threatening ecosystems that winter sports depend on.

I write this from southwestern Colorado, the mountains that have shaped so many of my winters and so much of who I am. If I weren’t nine months pregnant right now, I’d be out touring the Southern San Juan range with friends, skinning up to ridgelines I’ve leaned on for solace and joy.

But in February, when we should be cutting tracks deep into fresh snow, we saw many days in the 60s.

Winter won’t disappear overnight. But every warm winter, every snow drought, and every ski resort increasingly reliant on machines is part of a larger story about the fragility of the season we love. As backcountry skiing continues to grow — and as skimo earns its place on the Olympic stage — that growth should make us joyful and uneasy, both.

The future of this sport isn’t just about human endurance and passion. It’s about the climate that makes snow possible in the first place — and the choices we make now, so that we and future generations can still climb above treeline and ski back down into wonder.