Skiing Celebrities; on snow in October

I was going to put up some nice fall foliage photos, but this is much more important. It's been a goal for me since my Junior year in High School to try and ski on my birthday. This year October 13th rolled around and, even though I was home in the mountains for Mid-semester break, things were just cold and rainy. Until the last few nights, that is, when a nasty Nor'easter blew in a dumped a foot of snow on top of Mt. Mansfield. Every fall I watch the webcams anxiously, and for the last 5 years I've dragged a crew of skiers up various mountains in search of October skiing. This morning Eric, Hollis, my friend Danika and I strapped the skinny skis on our backs and high-tailed it up Stowe's Toll Road to the white summit. This promised to be one of the best early snow trips ever.


The hike up was dry for the first part, but as the snow grew deeper we turned the corner and ran into a van from The Weather Channel. Not your local newscast team, the actual legit Weather Channel. We were called over by a guy named Jim Cantore, who Danika excitedly informed us was some type of TV celebrity in the weather world. News to me. He introduced himself and asked us to ski back a forth a little bit between two lift towers as the were "Desperate for some B-roll footage".


Needless to say it was incredibly nerve-wracking to be putting on real skis and taking our very first strides of the season on national television, but we figured the general public wouldn't have much idea what we were doing anyway. Jim thanked us afterward, and immediately we tried to get in touch with anyone who was near a TV, as we were told we would be on TV within the hour. My roommate Ryan was watching and confirmed that he did see us. After the excitement of our 4 seconds of fame, we were even more pumped to ski. We reached a nice flat spot and packed out a 200 meter loop that included some turns, a small climb and descent.

It was about as perfect as you could ask for in October; the snow packed into a solid track for skating, and we made a set of separate classic tracks to switch on and off.


We were far from the only people up there, but we were the only Nordic skiers we saw; the first skating and classic strides in the East? Maybe. Definitely the only ones on television in October. Apparently our skiing wasn't scenic enough to make it onto the re-released web-version of the clip, where they used some 'piner bro instead. Still, you can watch Jim's segment on Stowe HERE, the front-page story on weather.com