The VT Blog

A Jay Peak Thanksgiving

Posted on by ml242

Last August a friend asked me to recommend the Eastern resort with the best chance for fresh snow over the Thanksgiving weekend. I was intrigued because it seemed like a bold and direct challenge to me, to organize an early season destination trip with a good shot at pow.

Jay-Summit

It didn’t take me long to consider Jay Peak, Vermont. Jay is of course the exception that proves the rule, recent winner of Powder Magazines “Best Pow” award and home of a mindbending Eastern US accumulation record total of more than 500″ in a single season.

While there are few guarantees for conditions anywhere on the planet, I’d also been itching to get back to Jay. Few resorts get to completely re-imagine themselves, but it seems that’s what Jay has done in the past 20 years.

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Tagged: Jay Peak, VT4 Comments

Stowe, Vt: Ignition 2014

Posted on by miker92

November is a dangerous time of year for productivity. If you’re like me, you’ve got a few extra tabs open in your browser at any given moment: one for NOAA, another for your blogging ski-weatherman of choice, and maybe another for a favorite mountain.

Stowe-Vt-November-2014

With rumors flurrying last week about a few inches here or a foot there and with Killington’s trusty machinery as a fallback, I knew I’d be on snow come Saturday morning. The question was where.

For the first time since I learned to ski at age five, the season snuck up on me. I’m usually watching powder edits by mid-August and scraping off summer wax in early October, just in case. Fresh out of college and living in a new town with a job, though, I had other things on my mind this year. When temperatures started to dip toward the end of last month and pictures of dusted peaks began popping up online, I almost wasn’t ready.

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Tagged: Stowe, VT7 Comments

Viking Nordic Ski Center, VT

Posted on by Peter Minde

As we glided out of the woods, our daughter Laurel shouted, “This… is AWESOME!” We’d gotten to one of those classic Vermont xc ski vistas: a huge view across miles of rolling hills with woods and open fields, dotted with houses and barns. Then she double poled into a plunging, curvy downhill on to Viking Nordic’s Loki’s Run trail.

Viking-Nordic-Ski-Center

Last February, we drove to Landgrove, Vermont for Presidents’ Day weekend. Seeking respite from too much snow in New Jersey, so we drove north to …more snow. Just 40 miles north of Prospect Mountain, one of our regular haunts, I’d never been to this part of Vermont.

While there are plenty of unexplored touring centers on my bucket list, the plan was to stick close to our hotel and ski at Viking and at Wild Wings Ski Touring Center down the road.

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Tagged: Nordic Skiing, VT5 Comments