The Call of the Mountains
Photography by Nathanael Asaro
Vermont is well known for having a diverse offering of all four of Mother Nature’s seasons. We run the range from triple-digit heat with shirt drenching humidity in the summer down to the sub-zero freeze-your-face-off-just-by-stepping-outside winter. The cycle of the seasons is something that residents here in the Green Mountain State are used to. Live here long enough and certain patterns and routines become a must with the change of the seasons.
Fall in Vermont is magical with an explosion of autumnal colors that calls tourists to our state from all over the world. But once the leaves are gone there can be a long pause until the start of our beloved winter. If an early season snowfall hits, you might sneak in a hike or two before your local resort opens. If Mother Nature decides to play it slow, we’re typically at the mercy of the resorts’ snow guns, and consider ourselves lucky if we get a ribbon of snow snaking down the mountain.
For those of us that feel the call of the mountains when the snow begins to fly and the temperatures begin to drop, there are certain rituals that precede the coming of winter. The digital era has somewhat transformed the anticipation of the time-honored fall releases —the coming of winter always used to coincide with favorite magazines and videos appearing in local shops. Printed catalogs and VHS are clearly gone from the picture, and although the hard copies of the creative output from our favorite crews and brands have moved to a digital format, that feeling of anticipation of what’s coming next is still there and always will be.
With that anticipation comes the checklists and procedures. Check and tinker with last year’s gear. Or if you’ve treated yourself to something new, setting it up and seeing how it all feels, making sure you’ve got it dialed in. There’s the ceremonial walking around the living room in your boots…you know…just to become reacquainted again. Winter folk are creatures of habit and it’s pretty easy to stick with the comings and goings of those habits as the seasons cycle through the year.
November 2018 in Vermont had different plans for us though. If you had a routine, a checklist or some sort of calendar of events you pace yourself by all notions of a preseason were tossed out the window. A week before our resort officially opened we were hiking to reports of over a foot of snow in our hills. Usually opening day at your resort can be a gamble. What board should I bring? I don’t want to ding up anything nice and new…I’ll bring the “rock” board — typically a wise move to exploit its purpose of enduring all the beatings the pow boards should avoid. However, by the time our resort did open we were fully engulfed in snow and merely using the open lifts to access higher terrain to hike to. By the end of November, we had broken records for snowfall totals and accessed more terrain than we could have ever dreamed of so early in the season. By the time December rolled around, we were waking up to daily reports of new snow, further opening up zones and spots that are typically on reserve until February. Hikes to the top of Vermont that early had been heard of…but the lines and overall enjoyment factor were always questionable. Last year’s preseason unequivocally put an end to that. Before the winter solstice arrived, we were comfortably hiking to zones that we typically have no business being anywhere near. We thought to ourselves, if this is fall in Vermont, can you imagine what our winter is going to be like?
And with the most current forecasts of our fall of 2019 looking similar to 2018...we wait with that same sense of anticipation of what’s to come and how good it may be.
