Have you ever gone on a trip and immediately after coming home you think, “We need to do that again!”? Well, that was exactly how I felt about the ski trip my friends and I took to Vermont in winter 2021. Since, at the time, there were heavier COVID restrictions, finding fun things to do on the weekend was difficult. A group of us decided we were going to purchase Epic Passes to allow us to ski and snowboard as much as we wanted to that season. If you haven’t heard of the Epic Pass, it is essentially a season-long ski pass that allows you to access many of the mountains all over the United States.

The Epic Pass includes Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont, so one weekend in February, we piled all of our equipment into the car and took the seven-hour drive north. The day we were planning on hitting the road to head to our Airbnb, there was 8 inches of snow expected to hit all across the East Coast, so we woke up in the middle of the night to get ahead of the storm, only hitting heavy downfall early in the morning. Once safely arriving at the Airbnb we had rented in Hardwick, Vermont, we all relaxed for the night before waking up early to take the quick drive over to Stowe.

The town of Stowe feels like a quaint winter village you would see in a Lifetime Christmas movie, with plenty of small shops and restaurants. A famous brewery in town is The Alchemist Brewing Company, located right along the drive up the mountain. We stopped there to pick up some drinks for our day of skiing. I chose the Imperial IPA called Heady Topper. As we approached the mountain, we had music blasting to get ourselves excited for our day. Once we parked, we strapped on our boots, bundled up in our cold-weather gear and walked over to the lifts to start skiing.

Now, as someone who previously only skied in Pennsylvania, the conditions that far north were a dream to me. The trails were a world of difference from the patchy, icy conditions I grew up skiing. This was the first time I was really able to go off-trail through the trees and down more challenging slopes. Once we got to know the mountain, we stopped on our path through the trees and enjoyed some of the drinks we got at The Alchemist. We spent the rest of the day checking out as many trails as possible, stopping only once or twice to recharge with food and drink. As the sun began to set, we headed back to our cars and Airbnb, made a delicious taco night dinner, and slept before coming back for round two the next day.

After two long days skiing, it was finally time to face the long drive home. Once back in Philadelphia, we all went home excited to make the trip again in the future. Although last winter the group wasn’t able to make the trip, as we all were starting new jobs and moving to different cities, we have already begun planning to make the 2023 Vermont ski trip happen.

— Aly Evans, administrative assistant