Butler, M Blake, "Canada's Evergreen Playground: A History of Snow in Vancouver" (2023). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 9233. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/9233
This thesis from 2023 is a great read -- I'll endeavor to post various excerpts from it at least once a week on here.
Summary for Lay Audience
The City of Vancouver is not as snowy as the rest of Canada; rain, not snow, is its defining weather feature. But snow is a common seasonal occurrence, having fallen there nearly every winter since the 1850s. This dissertation places snow at the centre of the City of Vancouver’s history. It demonstrates how cultural and natural factors influenced human experiences and relationships with snow on the coast between the 1850s and 2000s. Following Vancouver’s incorporation, commercial and civic boosters constructed – and settlers adopted – what I call an evergreen mentality. Snow was reconceptualized as a rare and infrequent phenomenon. The evergreen mentality was not completely false, but it was not entirely true, either. This mindset has framed human relationships with snow in Vancouver ever since. While this idea was consistent, how coastal residents experienced snow evolved in response to societal developments (such as the rise of the automobile and the adoption of new snow-clearing technologies) and regional climate change.
I show that the history of snow in Vancouver cannot be fully understood without incorporating the southern Coast Mountains. Snow was a connecting force between the coastal metropolis and mountainous hinterland. Settlers drew snowmelt to the urban environment for its energy potential and life-sustaining properties; snow drew settlers to the mountains for recreation and economic opportunities. Mountain snow became a valuable resource for coastal residents throughout the twentieth century. Human relationships with snow in the mountains were shaped, as they were in the city, by seasonal expectations, societal circumstances, and shifting climate conditions.
In charting a history of snow in Vancouver and the southern Coast Mountains, this dissertation clears a new path in Canadian environmental historiography by bringing snow to the historiographical forefront. It does so in an urban space not known for snow, broadening the existing geography of snow historiography. In uncovering snow’s impact on year-round activities, this work also expands the field’s temporal boundaries. Through this work, one sees how snow helped to make Canada’s Evergreen Playground.
Snow is an overlooked and often forgotten aspect of Vancouver’s winter climate. It is not the defining feature of the coast’s winter weather as it is in the rest of Canada. Instead, the southwestern coast of mainland British Columbia is subjected to waves of heavy rain throughout the winter months.
Snow seems to belong more naturally in the North Shore Mountains, the backdrop for countless photographs of Vancouver. The white peaks provide a sharp contrast to the city’s winter greenery. But snow is a seasonal presence in Vancouver. It has coated the coastal metropolis in all but four winters since meteorological records began in 1899.
Between 1899 and 1971, the average annual snowfall in downtown Vancouver was 64 cm. Snow covered the ground for an average of 12 days per year during this period. (Primary weather observations shifted in the mid twentieth century from the downtown to the Vancouver International Airport, located 10 km south of downtown on Sea Island.
At the airport, the average annual snowfall between 1939 and 1997 was 49 cm).3 Generally, snow does not persist for weeks or months, as it does in the rest of Canada; rather it lasts just a few days or a few hours before it disappears. Weeks or months may pass between snowfalls. But when it does fall, as it did in December 2016, it really is more of “the same old, same old.”
Human perceptions about seasonal and climatic norms influenced how people experienced snow in Vancouver. Snow was an expected seasonal occurrence in the mid nineteenth century. Coast Salish peoples and early European settlers were unsurprised when it fell.
Ideas about snow and the coastal climate shifted following the City of Vancouver’s incorporation in 1886. Commercial and civic boosters downplayed snow’s prominence to attract investment, settlement, and tourism to the Terminal City. They promoted the coast’s mild winters and asserted that snow was a rare and short-lived phenomenon. This idea was widely adopted by the tens of thousands of settlers who moved to the coast during the low-snow winters of the early twentieth century without prior knowledge of the region’s winter climate.
Settlers considered their city to be a snowless “Evergreen Playground,” an idea that did not necessarily align with natural conditions. The dominance of this mindset – what I call the “evergreen mentality” – has persisted throughout Vancouver’s history.
[...]
The evergreen mentality was not necessarily false – snow was rarer and less frequent on the coast compared to other parts of Canada – but it was not completely true either.
Many of the challenges that people have had with snow have occurred when natural conditions have not aligned with these expectations. This happened frequently in Vancouver.
There seemed to be a collective amnesia about snow on the coast; the fact that it fell in any discernable quantity for any length of time consistently surprised coastal residents.
Descriptions of snow as “unexpected” or “uncommon” appeared in local newspapers constantly throughout the twentieth century. Believing snow to be rare, coastal residents were complacent about it.
Throughout Vancouver’s history, people were unprepared to deal with snow in ways that other, snowier North American cities have been. Snow thus had an outsized impact on many aspects of urban life such as travel and municipal snow-clearing efforts.
[...]
Snow was a serious problem because of the evergreen mentality. For most of the city’s history, the dominance of this mindset prevented residents from taking the necessary precautions to adequately prepare for snow.
A contrasting narrative is again apparent in the southern Coast Mountains. While snow often falls to considerable depths each winter, there is also considerable variability from year to year.
Shifting regional climate patterns create weather conditions that can lead to greater or lesser annual snowpack totals. In-season weather events such as temperature inversions (the reversal of a mountain’s normal temperature dispersion, i.e., warmer temperatures at the peak than at the base) and rainstorms can melt and wash away the accumulated snowpack.
Low snow winters contradicted human expectations about snow in these mountains. A lack of mountain snow jeopardized aspects of human society that depended on its abundance and reliability. It meant less meltwater was available for human consumption and energy use in urban settings during the spring and summer months, for example.
Back in the mountains, alpine ski areas – which invested millions of dollars to attract locals and tourists to their large, capital-intensive resorts following the Second World War – were unable to operate without snow. In a landscape so often dominated by snow, its absence was intensely felt by coastal residents.
Meteorological observations and documentary records show that winters in the Vancouver area were probably colder and snowier in the mid-nineteenth century than they were in the mid- to late twentieth century.
[...]
These climatic shifts had disparate effects on how people thought about and experienced snow in Vancouver and the southern Coast Mountains. The evergreen mentality, for example, was cemented during the low snow years of the 1900s. Tens of thousands of arriving settlers were told of the coast’s snowlessness during a decade in which snow was less prevalent than normal.
Residents were acutely aware of the changing conditions around them, too. During the snowy winters of the late 1940s and early 1950s, coastal residents believed rightly that these “unprecedented” winters signaled that their climate had changed; however, they attributed this to nuclear testing rather than still-to-be discovered regional climate patterns.
The effects of climate change were most clearly felt in the southern Coast Mountains. The drier, warmer weather conditions that typically occurred during El Niño winters or positive PDO cycles affected snow’s abundance, which in turn impacted alpine ski activities and the availability of meltwater for freshwater and energy production.
Ski operators invested millions of dollars into new and enlarged ski areas during the 1945-76 negative PDO cycle, a period that produced favourable snow conditions in these mountains.
The shift back to a positive cycle in 1977 and the growing effects of global climate change produced warmer and drier winters that underscored the industry’s vulnerability to uncooperative winter weather.
