Warm winter culture

Longstanding Alaskan traditions are being shaped by warming winters. 2025 was no exception.

On the opening weekend of the 90th annual Fur Rendezvous, Alaska’s largest and most famous winter festival, crowds walked through downtown Anchorage in awe of what was absent.

Snow.

No blanket of white stretched across buildings and cars, no banks grew taller on parking lots and curbs. The city’s much-anticipated street maintenance dashboard for snow plow information, new and improved for 2025, delivered no updates — there was nothing to report.

By late February 2025, just 6 inches of winter snow had fallen on Anchorage, fewer amounts than the unlikely destinations of New Orleans, Atlanta and Austin. Compared to the record-setting season the year before, which saw a cumulative dumping of more than 132 inches of snow on the state’s largest city, residents anticipating vibrant winter sports and classic festivities were let down by relentlessly temperate and snowless conditions. In a city where winter defines rhythm and recreation, its absence reshaped everything from festivals to identity.

Oddities abounded and traditions were tamped. Instead of clearing icy roads, plows and pickup trucks did just the opposite. Parading down Fourth Avenue on the eve of the Rondy, their stows brimming with snow collected from higher elevations around Anchorage, workers dumped snow on the roads and packed it flat, providing an artificial lane through which mushers could guide their dog teams.

The World Open Dog Sled Championships is usually a 26-mile race held over three days, a staple of the Fur Rondy’s opening weekend. This year it was reduced to just a 3-mile loop.

The following weekend’s Iditarod Race experienced even greater disruptions. After the ceremonial start in Anchorage, the teams traveled up to Fairbanks to begin their race, the fourth time in history the race had to restart in Fairbanks.

Partiers looking forward to the annual Trailgate, an unofficial tailgate party hosted along the original route, were disappointed when the event was cancelled. The mushers’ shortened path, the organizers disappointedly announced, would come nowhere close to the rowdy crowds.

“Tragedy,” they wrote on their Facebook page. “You know what else is tragic? Climate change (we need snow!!)”

The frustration from these events wasn’t limited to the mushers or the fans. When winters weaken, so do the rhythm’s people rely on — for recreation, for work, for identity. In a place like Alaska, no one is entirely spared from climate change.

Scientists feel it too. They may spend their days poring over data and models, but many of them ski these trails, fish these rivers and shovel the same driveways. Winters like 2025 aren’t just anomalies to them, they’re evidence in a much larger story.

To understand these shifts and help Alaskans adapt, researchers at the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center are looking closely at what warmer winters mean.

That includes everything from how melting glaciers change salmon streams and flood coastal towns, to the impact of snow avalanches on wildlife populations, and even sea ice affecting the way of life of walrus, polar bears, and remote Alaskans. Scientists are leaving no iceberg unturned.

In 2023, Jeremy Littell, a research ecologist from the USGS Alaska Science Center, led a study modeling what the future for snowpack might look like across the state. The results were shocking. By the 2050s, the snow season could decrease by one to five months, and some parts of Alaska may lose persistent snow altogether.

The snowless season of Anchorage in 2025 was a glimpse of what may lie ahead.

From the ceremonial start in Anchorage, to the finish line on the frozen coast of Nome, the Iditarod trail itself looks different now. Disappearing snow and ice are reshaping more than the environment, but the ways Alaskans live, celebrate and connect with their home.