The Ski Log Blog

Liftline at Stowe, May 11, 2018. The thing about late-spring skiing is it can be great or it can be awful, sometimes on the same trip, and sometimes on the same day. So it was last week when I headed to Vermont to get my younger daughter from her first year at UVM. When she picked UVM about a year ago, I thought I could combine getting her there and visiting her with some skiing, and I've done just that. I had no idea, though, that getting her at the end of the year in mid-May would be one of those times. But I kept watch on both the forecast for the Green Mountains at the webcams at Stowe and Sugarbush and decided that it could work this time. Once I made the four-hour one-way drive to get her all in one day, and I vowed to avoid that again. So I'd go up Thursday, ski, spend the night, ski Friday and load up the car and head home. That was the plan. The forecast had Thursday dawning sunny but with rain and possibly thunderstorms arriving in the afternoon. If I shoved ...

Every spring I tell myself I'm going to extend the ski season. I'm going to ski in May. This year, it finally happened. Barely, but it happened. Each year I look on in amazement at internet pictures from Mount Washington, Killington, Sugarbush, Jay Peak and other Northeast skiing areas that stay open or keep snow deep into the spring. And each year after I come in off the hill sometime in the first half of April I rationalize to myself that this might be the year I ski in May. But it's never happened. Usually I wrap up in the first week of April, or maybe the second. I think my latest is April 16. A freak snowstorm came through and I skinned up the far side of the then long-closed ski area one early morning. It was one of the best runs of an otherwise bad, mild-winter year. This year, though, was an up-and-down winter with a long and severe mid-February thaw followed by weekly snowstorms in March and one of the coldest Aprils on record. I kept watching the webcam for...