Reducing Our Impact
Environmental Excellence
In 2023, Wild Mountain was honored by the National Ski Areas Association with the Golden Eagle Award for Overall Environmental Excellence. This award is given annually to a ski industry leader in sustainability with broad programming and a holistic approach leading to overall environmental achievement across their operations.
Proudly Carbon Neutral
Wild Mountain has achieved carbon neutrality since 2020, an environmental milestone, through reducing energy use, diverting waste and offsetting carbon.
Environmental stewardship is a key pillar to Wild Mountain’s operations, and we achieved the CarbonNeutral® Certification from Climate Impact Partners, the leading experts on carbon neutrality, which works with organizations around the world to deliver solutions that ensure immediate, positive impacts on the world’s natural capital.
To achieve carbon neutrality, Climate Impact Partners worked with us to calculate and offset the property’s unavoidable emissions by supporting a project to reduce the equivalent emissions. Natural Capital Partners identified the Seneca Meadows Landfill Gas project in New York and reforestation projects in the Amazon as offset projects that could not exist without funding from organizations like ours.
Of course, there’s more that we can do to account for our environmental impacts. But, achieving carbon neutrality is a positive step on our journey to Keep It Wild.
Planet-Positive Investments
After installing our new chairlift in 2023, we seeded several acres with native plant seed to help revegetate the disturbed area. These native plants help provide nectar and shelter for the bugs and birds that call Minnesota home. See more here. Wild Mountain is one of the first ski areas in the United States to own two Taiga Nomad electric snowmobiles. These machines are electric and emissions-free. Oh yeah... they also go zero to 60mph in 3 seconds. The monarch butterfly, quite possibly the most beloved bug of Minnesota, has been added to the Endangered Species List created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. These delightful creatures make an extraordinary migration each year from North America to their wintering grounds in Mexico. But, habitat loss and climate change is driving populations down. The insect that we enjoying seeing has declined 84% from 1996 to 2014. In 2021, Wild Mountain recognized this plight and registered the mountain as a Monarch Waystation with Monarch Watch. Wild Mountain’s ski trails offer a prairie environment with the types of milkweed species monarchs need to reproduce. Our waystation designation means that we’ve minimized summer trail mowing to ensure monarchs, and pollinators of all types, have food and shelter during the spring, summer and fall. Wild Mountain has acquired 4 HKD Volt snowguns to support reducing energy consumption for snowmaking. These snowmakers use approximately 1/3 the power as traditional snowguns. Two of these units were made possible from the 2021 Sustainable Slopes Grant from the National Ski Areas Association and HKD Snowmakers. In January 2021, Wild Mountain was awarded the CarbonNeutral® Certification from Climate Impact Partners for its work on reducing and offsetting its carbon emissions. In September of 2020 we began working with Climate Impact Partners to measure our carbon footprint. Measurement of the carbon we are emitting is a critical step in the long-term assessment and reduction of our carbon-emitting practices. Our retail shirts and hoodies are made of recycled plastic, recycled cotton, organic cotton and Modal (a fabric made from plastic and cellulose from birch trees). The fabrics are more friendly to the environment as they utilize recycled materials and use less (or no) water and fertilizers to create. We installed LED lights on the South Wild, North Wild and Ego Alley trails. LED lighting is much more efficient than our current metal halide lighting. Going forward, we plan to use LEDs to replace our existing flood lights across our slopes. We are eliminating single-use plastic beverage bottles and moving to infinitely recyclable aluminum bottles. To support that, we’ve added recycling receptacles across our property to support recycling and reduce waste. Wild Mountain created 288,000 pieces of single-use plastic waste in the past year. That's too much, and we are working to stop that with the elimination of single-use plastic on our property. We’ve moved to durable cutlery and food service wares in the goal of reducing the amount of plastic we add to the waste stream. Our team partnered with 3Degrees to offset the dirty energy coming to Wild Mountain with Renewable Energy Certificates generated from sources in Minnesota. Wild Mountain now operates year-round on 100% clean energy created in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Three EV chargers and one Tesla charger has been installed to support the needs of the emerging clean vehicle market. These two chargers are available to all guests, free of charge.
Prairie Seeding
Electric Snowmobiles
Monarch Waystation
Low Energy Snowmaking
Carbon Neutral
CARBON MONITORING
ECO-FRIENDLY RETAIL
LED LIGHT CONVERSION
IMPROVED RECYCLING
SINGLE-USE PLASTIC REDUCTION
100% CLEAN ENERGY
ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHARGING