James sent me an email about this thread and asked me to provide some input. As a Northern Vermont local, let me tell you that I haven’t encountered a single person discussing 2014-2015 as a contender for “best NE ski season in the last decade to go to northern VT”. As usual there’s probably a lot of selective memory at work in the general population forgetting seasons like 2007-2008, 2008-2009, and 2010-2011. The fact that much of the country has been having such a poor ski season, combined with the way parts of Southern New England have had a literally historic, all-time, record-breaking season of snowfall and sustained cold weather, presumably has people thinking that it was like that all over the Northeast. Well, let me be the first to tell you that’s not the case. Harvey even got to one of the actual issues with his comment about the snowfall at Gore, but it seems to have been overlooked in the rest of the nonsense. Look at the current season snow totals for Bolton, Stowe, and Smugg’s. It’s the end of March - they’re going to need 100+ inches in the next two to three weeks to get to any sort of numbers worthy of note. And, even if that were to happen, that’s never going to change having languished through months with below average snowfall.
Let’s see some of the various issues keeping this season from being one for the ages:
•Conditions over the holiday week were terrible; we didn’t ski once between December 23rd and January 4th.
•Season snowfall here at our location, which generally tracks very well with the mountains, is currently less than 90% of average.
•December snowfall was well (40%) below average.
•January snowfall was below average.
•February was the only midwinter month to even reach average snowfall.
•March snowfall is running below average.
•Total season snowfall to date is now behind the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 seasons, both of which ended up below average.
•We haven’t had any three or four-foot storm cycles, and maybe one? two-foot storm cycle this entire season.
•January and February temperatures were well below average, and snow preservation aside, that’s not good. You don’t need below average temperatures in the mountains of Northern Vermont in midwinter for good snow. If you’re going to be outside in January around here, you don’t want below average temperatures. I probably spent more days in the backcountry this season than any in recent memory, simply due to how many times it was just too cold to ride the lifts.
The only thing this season really had going for it was the snow preservation, and despite everyone touting how great it was, the increase was far more marginal than people make it out to be. It’s pretty common to go four to six weeks around here in midwinter without any notable thaw anyway, so to go for eight weeks or so simply means that roughly one typical occurrence was skipped. With average, or especially above average snowfall around here, those surfaces hardened by a thaw are forgotten within a week anyway. I get it that for people rolling the dice and skiing a specific weekend, or simply skiing on piste every weekend regardless of the conditions, some surfaces were probably better than average – but was that tradeoff worth the lack of fresh snow and all the bitter cold? Manmade snow and skier traffic degrade the on piste snow quality substantially, regardless of thaws, so like the snow preservation, the overall increase in the quality of snow surfaces around here was again pretty marginal. Essentially what we got this year was something like a Quebec or Front Range climate, colder/drier with better snow preservation, but less snow than is typical for Northern Vermont. I suspect there will be more “A” values than average for Northern Vermont on Tony’s chart snow quality chart for this season, but with % open terrain and packed powder playing heavily into the scheme there, that would make sense – that subset of the ski experience was indeed better than average.
If anything, this was the season to not ski Northern Vermont – don’t come up here to ski below average snowfall and frigid temperatures when places farther south are getting 200% of their average annual snowfall and almost unprecedented snow preservation that they might get once in a blue moon. The season has basically been pretty vanilla up here. Yes, there’s been great skiing around here this season, but people seem to easily forget that it’s like that most seasons. So, don’t worry if you missed this “season of the decade” up here, just come up next season and you’ve probably got a 50/50 shot of getting something just as great.
I know James as well, as a matter of fact he was the first skier I ever met "from the Internet." i actually talked to him while he was in the hospital after breaking his femur his first Utah trip (while skiing on a lift ticket I had given him), I then hung out with him in the Snowbasin clinic after breaking another bone while staying with us the following year.
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