It’s 2010 and Nina Miller-Browne, her husband, and their 12- and nine-year-old daughters arrive at Pats Peak in Henniker, N.H., to enjoy quality time swooshing down man-made snow created by one of the largest snow-making systems in the state. They are guests for an annual ski fundraising event. The eight-year-old daughter of the friend who invited Miller-Browne’s family is eagerly urging both families to start racing down the slopes. But there’s one problem: the Miller-Browne family has never skied before.

Miller-Browne is Jamaican-born and loves the outdoors, but didn’t grow up next to snow-covered mountains. Still, that wasn’t going to stop her from getting her family to the top of the mountain—even if they didn’t realize they were supposed to pull the ski bars over their laps during the lift ride. In what Miller-Browne describes as the “scariest experience ever,” she and her family skied down the mountain without any idea about what they were meant to do.

Despite not quite knowing the rules of the slopes, the family was not actually out of place. In fact, they were surrounded by racialized skiers, most of them new to the sport, thanks to a Boston Ski Club event specifically intended to offer would-be skiers a chance to fall in love with the sport—which is exactly what happened to her family, Miller-Browne says.

“Once you get up there and you get down, you’re empowered,” Miller-Browne says.

Over the past 50 years, Black ski and snowboarding programs have been gaining momentum across North America and Europe. The BIPOC Mountain Collective’s U.S. and Canadian network and the U.K.’s Nubian Ski Club are a few examples of the 61 other clubs that make up the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS), a non-profit that was incorporated in 1975 to create a national summit for Black skiers. Today, the NBS mission is to identify, develop and support athletes who are on track to represent the United States in international athletic tournaments, while their member clubs connect skiers—most of them Black—around the world. Then there are groups like Mount Noire, a luxury ski holiday team made up entirely of Black British women.

According to the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), in the 2022/2023 season, 88 per cent of U.S. skiers in the NSAA were white, compared to the 1.5 per cent who were Black. Though the stats are low, Miller-Browne says more Black people would love skiing if they gave it a chance. She’s speaking from experience. Fourteen years after seeing Mount Pats’s 770-foot peak for the first time, Miller-Browne now considers it a bunny hill. She has also become passionate about introducing more people, from more backgrounds, to the sport. To that end, she’s now president of Boston Ski Party, a non-profit that gives underprivileged youth a chance to participate in winter sports. Her club meets at Mount Sunapee in New Hampshire for 10 Sundays out of the year, where their partnership with the hill provides children the option to participate in group lessons, including adaptive classes for those on the spectrum and those living with physical disabilities.

Romell Ward, founder and executive director of BIPOC Mountain Collective, says the three barriers to Black people skiing are folks feeling uncomfortable learning in a predominantly white space, finding affordable gear and not having a community to accompany them. By working with resorts and other partners to help Black people take classes, setting people up with borrowed or used gear and creating community through lessons, competitions and tailgate parties to close the day, his organization addresses those challenges head-on. Meanwhile, groups like the NBS also provide space for people to contribute to a scholarship fund and become a partner to help build more spaces like these, and to create more opportunities.

This isn’t just a feel-good initiative; there’s an economic benefit to more inclusive spaces, Ward says.

“I believe a lot of [ski resorts] are starting to realize that diversity isn’t just a check box,” says Ward. “It’s also going to affect their bottom line…most of their clientele are older Caucasian people, and they’re starting to age out of being able to ski and snowboard.”

At the root of Ward’s, and Miller-Browne’s, advocacy is a love of the sport—and the lifestyle. In addition to the parties their organization hosts at ski resorts, Ward says BIPOC Mountain Collective members plan their own skiing and snowboarding adventures, at home and abroad. For example, women members are going on international girls’ trips because of the relationships they’ve made during the winter.

For Henri Rivers, president of NBS, the big community moment is their annual fundraiser, when members across their global skiing clubs can come together. In 2025, the NBS Summit will be held at Colorado’s Keystone Resort. Ticket funds support and sponsor the 34 athletes who are training competitively, and who include Rivers’s children: Henri IV, Henniyah and Helaina, 17-year-old skiing triplets. Some NBS athletes are even on track to compete in the 2026 Olympic Winter Games and others are reaching X Game status.

In many ways, young Black skiers are having a totally different experience than when Rivers started out as a preteen. His children grew up hitting the slopes with him and around their NBS community, which is not the case for most Black skiers.

“There [are] so many obstacles, but if [young skiers] see someone that looks like them, it opens up the door a little bit and lessens the negative view that they would get,” he says. Still, the racism he faced as a child has not evaporated.

Miller-Browne says that when the Boston Ski Club members have met in the past, white people have told them their group is taking up too much space on the hills and that they lack ski etiquette. At one resort, someone carved the N-word on resort property near the building where she and other Black members of the club were staying. She once had to talk to mountain staff to remove the hateful graffiti.

“It feels lonely when you’re out there and you don’t have that group,” says Miller-Browne.

However, because a growing community of Black skiers have taken to creating groups and spaces to share, it’s easier to face potential discrimination together.

“It’s still looming in the background if you allow it to grab hold,” says Rivers. “That was my job. I made sure that I was always around so that they wouldn’t be impacted by those biases and negative thoughts that others could throw their way.”

Meanwhile, bigger resorts are starting to take action. “From what I can tell, the big resorts here in the U.S. [have] been very open about ensuring it is a safe place as best they can,” Ward says. “[If] people start bothering you, the resorts will kick them off, and they’ve been proactive about hiring people of colour to teach.”

In fact, that’s what Ward, Rivers and Miller-Browne hope to see next: more Black coaches, more Black men on the mountains (many of the clubs have significantly more female members than male ones), simply more Black skiers everywhere.

In other words, it’s time for the Black community to show up for themselves—even if it is a little chilly out.