Stratton Receives a much awaited 44"

Nearly 3 feet of snow thumped down on Wednesday, February 24th. I was in and out of the white room all day and pointed it over cliffs I would never step up to without a sea of powder to land in!

At Mulligan's on Tuesday night, in-between scarfing down nachos smothered in melted cheese, serving N.Y. Strip steaks and chugging cranberry juice, I periodically opened the back door to see how much of the good stuff had accumulated.

I had been waiting for this all season. The night that I would have to blow up an air matress, lay it down in my 12'x12' office and crash here for the night. It needed to be done if I was to be on the American Express at the crack of dawn.

Burton, Forum, YES, K2, Atomic, Rossignol, Head - practically every ski & snowboard manufacturer in the industry happend to be here for a series of Demo Days and reps were frothing at the mouth, staring up at the empty chairs ascending into the snowy abyss.

Seemingly apologetic skiers were on their cell phones with friends who would miss the first chair. "They just closed the access road," one of them said. "And my buddies are stuck behind a Bud Light truck."

600 acres of untouched powder reserved for the 600 people who had spent the night drinking at Grizzly's, listening to DJ Boss-tone(out of Boston, where else?) and sleeping everywhere and anywhere but their own beds.

I went from bobbing my head to Sleigh Bells' "Ring Ring" playing in the background of a Sierra-At-Tahoe Powder Stache video to smiling and sweating in a balls deep stache of my own on Stumpy's. It was deep. I was with two kids who love snowboarding as much as I do. Boosting off of obstacles that would send a mountain biker to his bloody grave if he were truckin down this pitch in July.

Leone, who is the epitome of a fun-raiser, was talkin' to his homey Matty about the two things he loves most in this world as we sprawled out 3 wide on a high-speed six-pack in the Sun Bowl.

I love snowboarding because it makes me feel like I'm apart of a family. Not that I didn't have a family growing up, I did. And most of my family members were the ones who prompted me to beg and plead for a snowboard in the first place. But even now, with the members of my hometown crowd living the dream in their respective flats and cribs across the states, I still feel like I'm apart of something bigger. Something living and breathing and ever-changing.

This is my dream, and like the series of storms that keeps crashing into the Green Mountains, I don't want it to stop.