Author: Stu

Editor of the Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast

The Beast Returns to Early Season 2021

Posted on by Stu

I did without a lot of things last season. Ski buddies. Random chairlift conversations. Booting up in the lodge. Skiing out West. And, until my last day, Vermont.

Killington Peak Lodge

When the 2020-21 ski season wrapped, with an improbable bomb of an April snowstorm at Mount Snow, I thought that would be the end of Covid-era skiing, of masks and staggered lift-loading and travel restrictions and ski-area reservations. And while I had come to like booting up in my minivan, music blasting and heat cranking, I was done with the rest of it.

But as summer wore on and Covid surged once more, I didn’t know if skiing would or should be done with it. Perhaps this was a thing and we would just have to learn to live with it.

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Tagged: Killington, VT10 Comments

Mount Snow Chocolate Factory Tour

Posted on by Stu

All week I watched its improbable trajectory, spiraling toward the New England high country, an asteroid of a winter storm set to detonate over what little remained of lift-served skiing in what had been a wet and warm spring.

I kept waiting for the storm to fizzle or transform into rain or blow north and out to sea. Instead it set a bullseye on southern Vermont. By late in the week, Open Snow was forecasting 18 inches at Mount Snow overnight Thursday into Friday.

Of course. This had been a great winter, snow falling somewhere across the region every day from mid-January to the end of February, the best un-ending stretch of real winter we’d seen in years.

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Tagged: VT10 Comments

Willard Mountain: Rising Up

Posted on by Stu

Willard emerges abruptly, erupting out of the flats as you approach on NY Route 40, a prominence amid the meandering farmlands 30 miles north of Albany. The suddenness of it is stunning, delivering the sort of skiing-where-no-skiing-should-be sensation common to approaches to the Midwest ski hills from my youth.

Willard Mountain view

It’s a busy place. Even on a Friday and half an hour before the lifts opened, I followed a bunched line of cars edging along the network of narrow backroads accessing the ski area. In the lodge I waited in a line for my ticket, the first time since Hunter’s opening day. It’s also a friendly place, the woman at the counter thanking me profusely for “coming out and joining us” as she handed me a pair of sticky wicket tickets.

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Tagged: Adirondacks, Kids14 Comments