My friends call me The Prophet of Bad News. It started as a joke, a half-serious prediction that this year Patagonia would skip winter altogether. I was packing my life into boxes, moving north to the other side of the world, and I told them, “You’ll see: because I’m gone, no snow this year.”
In a sense, I was only adding some self-centered drama to what I knew was coming.
Last season we’d skied more than ever, from April to November, when the season normally ends by mid-October. But El Niño was finally giving way, and the Pacific was sliding toward neutral or weak La Niña conditions. That usually means less precipitation for southern South America, a thinner snowpack, and shorter ski seasons.
I expected a drier winter, nothing too serious. But the climate doesn’t do “typical” anymore; it mostly works in extremes now.
It started quietly. June came and went without snow. By July, the slopes were brown and cracked like an old, muddy painting. It hadn’t been this dry since at least 1964, when the local ski resort began operating. Old-timers talk about “legendary” seasons (the endless winter of ’77, skiing in December in ’95, the Japow-style snow of 2007).
This time, history had no reference point. 2025 wasn’t a bad season. It was the year Patagonia, burdened by human atmospheric madness, never turned white.
