November Magic!

It was called “White Saturday.” With the early season snow, Magic Mountain in Southern Vermont chose to spin the legendary Red Chair for one day only. The unprecedented event would be news for beating last year’s opening. Even bigger, it was still only November.

Prime Friday

Friday night is Prime at the Black Line Tavern, and we grabbed some of Vermont’s finest nourishment in preparation for the next morning.

On that day after Thanksgiving, we were thankful to have many Magic families show up for the occasion, including, of course, the family of our leader.

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I’m Done Skiing Alone

When I was a little kid living on a farm, I’d play by myself in a big tractor tire that served as a sandbox. I developed a reputation for playing alone. “Harvey doesn’t need playmates, he’s happy all by himself!” It wasn’t true, down inside I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know myself well enough to push back.

“Trust me, this opens up down below.”

As I got older, I got more proactive. In high school, I joined the cross country team and made best friends for life. Twenty five years after that, I discovered skiing, and it took me another two decades to learn the lesson all over again, in a new setting. A single life-changing event twenty years ago — a solo backcountry ski tour — delayed my embrace of this lesson.

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Magic: You Never Forget Your First Time

It seems like everyone has an opinion about Magic Mountain in Londonderry VT. I certainly had one, and I’d never skied there. Over the years I absorbed enough to know that the old school hill was the place to be when storms dump on Southern Vermont.

Magic door

I started to think about skiing Magic at the end of a big pow day at Hickory back in 2014. I met GetAmped who told me he lived in Schenectady, which was as he described it, “perfectly positioned in the center of the Magic Triangle.” I was already a big fan of the other two of the vertices of triangle, Plattekill and Hickory. But I’d never been to Magic.

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