New film sheds light on the disappearance of Colorado snowpack

Jane Zelikova’s The End of Snow will be one of many award-winning films set to play at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival this week. The picture premiered at the Boulder Adventure Film Festival in 2016 and has been on tour with the Telluride and Back Country Film fests over the past year. “It’s been viewed by people all over, people we would never have thought, I got an award in Estonia which is weird but wonderful,” said Zelikova. Zelikova is an ecologist who studies climate change. She has a Ph.D. from CU Boulder and has an active project at the University of Wyoming looking at the impacts of dust deposition on snowpack. Her film, The End of Snow, focuses on the effects of dust deposition in mountainous regions. Skiers and snowboarders in Colorado may have noticed the thin layer of red dust that cakes the modest amount of snow this year, especially in the Southwest region of the state. This red dust is blown from land in Arizona and Utah where farmers and ranchers are grazing cattle too early in the winter, when there isn’t enough rain to wet and maintain the soil. Grazing when it’s too dry creates a large amount of dust that is then carried and absorbed into our snowpack. The soil is dark — leading to a higher absorption of heat — which then melts the snow much quicker than normal. Even so, Zelikova understands the difficulty farmers face because of the incredible amount of work they have to finish in a time costly manner. Furthermore, adapting to the changing climate needs a reform on all levels of the farming industry. “It’s not to vilify—it’s ranchers and farmers who have BLM leases that, in the past, would’ve been able to graze without having so much soil disturbance. But because the climate is changing, plants are growing earlier, [animals are] grazing earlier,” she stated. Her movie, The End of Snow, was filmed in the mountainous regions of Wyoming and Colorado, where many ranchers live. It tells the story of three men whose lives are interlinked with the decreasing levels of snow across the Rocky Mountain Region. “As we were thinking about how to structure the film I kind of realized that me talking about dust deposition would be maybe a little bit boring,” Zelikova said. She wanted to give viewers an insight into her research through telling the stories of real people...more