Snowmaking and the Longest Season in the East
Near Killington, Vermont
The trail beneath you helps explain why people call Killington the mountain that never closes. When snowmaking machinery first appeared in the nineteen fifties, most ski operators dismissed it as a banana belt luxury for warm resorts too far south to trust real winter. Killington thought differently.
Through the nineteen sixties it invested heavily in snowmaking, and a string of low snow seasons proved the gamble right while rivals sat brown and idle. Today an enormous system blankets a majority of the resort's trails in manufactured snow, letting Killington open some years as early as October and stay running deep into spring. The heart of this effort is the Superstar trail, where crews pile snow into staggering reserves.
In strong years the snowpack on Superstar has climbed to towering depths, a white glacier towering over the surrounding green woods. That hoard is what allows the resort, again and again, to keep skiing alive into late May and even into June, often offering the longest lift served season in eastern North America. Skiing in a tee shirt down a ribbon of snow while the valley below blooms with summer is a Killington ritual, and it exists entirely because this mountain refused to let winter end on nature's schedule.
