J.Spin

That’s an excellent point - New England really does have quite the winter climate gradient if you think about going from the southern coast all the way up to northern Maine, or even just the northern mountains. Relative comparisons do seem to shape one’s perception of their local weather.

What I’ve observed here in the forum is that judging the quality of a winter is very subjective. I’m sure people can bring up specific examples from last season, or other seasons, but it seems possible for people to receive near average snowfall and still rate the winter as well below average. To some degree, it seems that what people want is consistency, or they want the snow to be around when they want it to be around. Realistically, one has to go pretty far north or up in elevation to have consistent snowpack on the ground all winter. As one heads further south and winter snowfall variability increases, snowpack that comes and goes throughout the winter, and the back and forth of cold storms followed by warm storms, is actually the “average”, or even the “normal” climate. People don’t typically seem to be keen on that back and forth in the winter though, even if that’s the typical climate. In areas with high snowfall variability there can still be periods where snowfall/snowpack can be much more consistent, and I think those get incorporated into part of the climate perception, making the inconsistent periods seem worse than they actually are.

That map looks pretty good for what I hear the resorts like – solid accumulations for the mountains, with potentially minimized travel disruptions in the big cities to allow people to travel to the snow. I think that storm produced great turns in some cases, but it also brought a lot of wind in spots that reduced the quality of the powder.

As I was reading this, it seemed appropriate that you were frequently putting “friends” in quotes, because I’m not sure who these people are that you’re talking about. Are we talking about born Vermonters, 7th generation types, transplants from out of state to a resort area, 2nd home owners, or something else? Everyone’s definition of “friend” is different I guess, but my actual friends would already know every detail of everything you poured out so thoughtfully in that paragraph. There would actually be no need to discuss any of it or even make it known to them – just from years of knowing me, they would already know my opinion on just about all of that and could easily assume that I was taking all those actions. People that don’t already have a feel for all that stuff, or would turn a blind eye to the issue are probably more in the realm of “acquaintances” or maybe “neighbors”, but they’re definitely something else. Yeah, it’s probably semantics, but the overall concept might be one of the confounding factors related to this issue.

Hehe, LOL, you’re right in that we aren’t your typical ski family. But, we’re certainly less unique if you compare us to other ski families around here in NVT or probably even other parts of NNE. I actually brought up the season ski rental time limitation issue though because it happened to a colleague of mine at work – he was renting for the season from Bolton for his kids, and had planned to continue using the skis to ski at places like Stowe, Smugg’s, Sugarbush, Jay Peak, etc. at the end of the season. But, he unfortunately had to return the skis when Bolton closed down at the beginning of April, so that was pretty inconvenient. I’d never even thought of that sort of limitation on season rentals until he pointed that out. Also, I wasn’t sure how serious Phin was going to get with the family’s skiing now that they’d be living so deep in NNE ski country. I see now that he mentioned a couple dozen days as a rough number, and that’s actually a pretty solid season.

I agree that it could be very dicey. I would seriously encourage anybody who has even remotely thought about getting a backcountry/skinning setup to have one on hand this season. Even if the worst happens and the resorts not only shut down lift service, but somehow revert to closing resort-based uphill access again, midwinter will still offer all the usual backcountry spots. I could imagine the more formal spots like Pinkham Notch being closed again, but it would be hard to imagine the state trying to close all public lands to access. I’m not sure how they would enforce that.

Yeah, there’s no way a regular swap format can be used. I’m really hoping they can figure something out to do some sort of swap-style events. They’re just so useful, and they’re also fundraising events for a lot of schools and organizations.

Daily rentals are always a hassle, but they’re probably going to be a massive pain this coming season. Season ski package rentals for the kids are a great option for many families, since there are some excellent perks like being able to simply have things replaced if they break (within reason), or swap out skis or boots for a larger size if the child grows a bunch during the season. We never went that route though, because buying skis for our boys was better for a number of reasons: · Most places you rent from, whether from the mountain or from a local shop, have a limited rental season. You have to wait until a certain date until they start the rentals (around November, but it can vary), and there’s a date by which you have to return them (typically sometime in April). This is obviously a huge headache if you’re going to ski the full season, and our family typically skis from October through June as long as the snow is around, so that would cut off a lot of the season. · The options for rental skis are typically limited – they’ll certainly have all around carving skis, and they’ll often have a twin tip option as well if kids would like a more park/freestyle-oriented ski, but they’re not typically going to have more specialized skis like power skis, Telemark skis, AT skis, etc. · It’s really not that expensive to buy kid’s skis of you go to the ski swaps. There are tons of ski swaps each season, and the prices for kid’s skis are often very reasonable. For just a regular pair of all around carving skis, you can easily find a used pair for ~$100 or less. We would buy a pair like that for our older son, and he would use them for two years, and then our younger son would have them for two years, so we would get four years out of that $100 investment, and you’re talking $25 a season. Then after they’ve outgrown them, you can typically recoup half the money by selling them back at a swap, so in the end, the yearly cost is really minimal. How much of this you can do obviously depends on the age distribution of your kids of course, but depending on how that works out, it can actually be cheaper than a season rental. Good powder skis are harder to find at swaps, so we would only occasionally get lucky and find something, but most of the time we had to buy those new. But, we’d still get a previous year’s model, the price would be reasonable, and we’d get four years out of them and be able to get money for them in the end at a swap. For Tele (and likely AT skis as well), forget about it, we always had to buy new. Kid’s Tele skis are not all that common as it is, and in all my years I’m not sure I’ve seen any at the swaps.

That’s a great perspective. If that nearby Randolph site is reflective of the snowfall in the general area… then simply LOL. Based on the numbers I’ve seen, it won’t matter the long wave pattern, the storm track, the rain/snow line, the temperature departures, the states of the indices, or whatever factors people are going to discuss and stress over – the snow is just going to come in hand over fist. I guess it’s possible, but I can’t imagine the area can really get to those types of insane snowfall numbers without at least some type of upslope component, so you’re probably looking at an average of roughly 100 days a year with some sort of snowfall. I’m going to assume that you’re not like some on the forum that just want the occasional big storm to hit and then clear out so they don’t have to deal with that dreaded “nuisance” snow… because I have a suspicion that the winters in that area don’t quite run like that.

Our snowfall relative to average was even worse at around 46%, so I thought our area had it bad relatively speaking – until I saw some of the SVT numbers from backedge. I guess they really got the shaft. In terms of receiving sizeable storms, it doesn’t seem as if it was as bad around here relative to some places – the top five storms in terms of snowfall amounts were: 1. 11.2” - 1/18/16 - Upper level low/inverted trough + upslope 2. 7.3” - 1/12/16 - Clipper-redeveloper 3. 6.6” - 12/29/15 - Southwest flow event; Winter Storm Goliath 4. 5.4” - 2/8/16 - General upper level trough moving into Northeast plus moisture from Winter Storm Mars offshore 5. 5.0” - 4/6/16 - Low pressure tracking through St. Lawrence Valley It’s relative of course, but another aspect of that season that makes it such a pain in the data set is that it’s the only one in my records without a storm ≥ 12”, so it screws with any calculations involving that parameter.

The statistics say your guess is probably correct. Using the latest stats for our location, the snowfall deviation on that 2015-2016 season was an incredible -2.29 σ, meaning it should fall in the bottom 1.1% of all seasons. So, it’s essentially a 1 in 100-year event that most of us will probably not see again in our lifetimes. Based on snowfall observations up to that point, it seemed that 100” of snow was probably the practical floor for snowfall around here – even that very poor 2011-2012 season brought 115” of snow. Indeed, the stats say that getting below 100” of snow in a season here should only happen in the bottom few % of seasons (probably something in the range of 1 in 20 to 1 in 50 seasons, so the 72.2” that season was a massive aberration as your Stowe numbers indicated). It’s also interesting to note that even in that very unusual/aberrant season, our snowfall here was still right around 50% of your Stowe/Mansfield number as it usually is.