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zombienutz1 t1_j0glfjc wrote

Valentine's Day 2007 always comes to mind. I can't remember exactly how much snow but maybe 3' in 24 hours? I couldn't get to my apartment in Burlington, so I parked in the parking garage at Gutterson for a few days and stayed with friends on campus. We ended up sledding down Main St., jumping off roofs into snow piles, and bombing around empty streets in my Subaru.

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PuddleCrank t1_j0gpoc8 wrote

During that storm the sidewalk plow in Essex Junction broke, so we had an extra Monday off. Legend tells of a vigilante high-schooler that forget his cinderblock on the sidewalk.....

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whaletacochamp t1_j0gz18x wrote

I was a bit younger then - 14 or so. We played guitar hero for hours on end at a friends house, attempted to ride our bikes through the snow to the store to get maple syrup for sugar on snow, realized maple was way more expensive than what we could afford, and then physically couldn't bike back home. I think we got 3 snow days in a row maybe?

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No-Ganache7168 t1_j0hmcrw wrote

Yes. I was working a service job in Stowe. All of the visitors were freaking out. One of my coworkers discovered his wipers weren’t working when we got off. He didn’t want to leave his car bc he was afraid it would get towed. Another coworker drove ahead of him so that he could blindly follow her

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Successful_Order_638 t1_j0i30ub wrote

Greatest snowstorm ever. I skied Mad River Glen for a $14 lift ticket. Valentine’s Day special. The snow under the single chair was armpit deep. After the lift closed I came back to my car and the snow was all the way up to the windows. Must have been almost a four foot storm.

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patonbike t1_j0kkj6i wrote

Hilariously just like mad river to have previously committed to discounted lift pricing on epic powder day. I’ll be up there tomorrow.

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mad9779 t1_j0gsxap wrote

I remember that! We had no sidewalk in front of our house until Spring.

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thisoneisnotasbad t1_j0iioz5 wrote

My work was closed for 2 1/2 days. I was able to jump off a shed roof into the show and not get hurt, it was awesome.

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bonanzapineapple t1_j0iu8a3 wrote

Dude we had tons in Lebanon, biggest snow heaps I remember seeing and the plow on my street made a giant heart at the intersection. Such a fun day

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tbryant87 t1_j0jpfdf wrote

I was in college, skipped class and somehow made it to Jay Peak. One of the best snowboarding days ever.

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Cease_Cows_ t1_j0gj0z5 wrote

Today is my 3 year old sons first "real" snow day (that he's even sort of aware of) and he's LOSING HIS MIND. I guess at some point in my old age I forgot just how exciting getting a big snowstorm and then getting to stay home to play in it is. He's been watching out the window for the plow guy for the last hour and keeps ranting about how big the snow piles are gonna be once he gets here.

He also put his snowsuit on immediately upon waking up, although we've since gotten him out of it (temporarily).

Love days like this!!

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Practical-Intern-347 t1_j0glxnb wrote

Parent of a 3.5 y/o... can confirm 100% of this. We read our 'snowplow' book 5-6 times yesterday evening in anticipation. He's been telling me that he's going to "plow up a HUGE PILE for you and mama to shovel."

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whaletacochamp t1_j0h30j5 wrote

God I can friggen wait! I've just got a little bald toothless 5.5mo old right now, but mom was very happy that her school was closed and so was his daycare.

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ReasonableLiving5958 t1_j0gma2p wrote

Not necessarily a memory I ENJOY, but...

When we were little and too dumb to pay attention to the news (back in the 90s when you'd watch that ticker at the bottom of the TV) , we only knew school was canceled because our parents told us.

Our parents told us there was school. We lived across the street from the school and all four of us (me and my three siblings) crossed the street and waited at the playground for 30 minutes. There were a few cars there so we just assumed the busses were late and that's why the lady who usually let's us in hasn't yet. After those 30 minutes the janitor sees us and tells us school was canceled.

We go home and my dad laughs and goes "oops."

Years later my mom and dad told us that they hadn't banged in a while so they conjured up this evil scheme so they had a little bit of time to pork each other.

Thanks mom and dad.

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hideous-boy t1_j0gn834 wrote

watching that ticker on snow days was the most exciting thing in the world when I was a kid. And it happened fairly often because I grew up in VA and they can't handle snow down there!

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PuddleCrank t1_j0gq3fa wrote

It's critical to the school experience. The other option was listening on the radio and waiting for your school to come up in the list.

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whaletacochamp t1_j0h3etu wrote

Gross lol.

My mom and uncle tell a story about going down to the beach in the summer and not being allowed back until noon for lunch (they grew up in the red rocks/queen city park neighborhood in Burlington). Well one day my uncle decided to go back early...you had to walk past my grandparents bedroom window to get into the house and let's just say he saw and heard something that sent him running back to the beach.

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Food_Library333 t1_j0gphs3 wrote

Maybe not epic but My wife is from out west in the desert. Her first year living here (maybe 2004?) On Thanksgiving we woke up to beautiful 70° day that turned into a violent thunderstorm that turned into a snow storm and dropped like 4 or 6 inches. She just looked at me wide eyed and said "Where the f*** did you take me?"

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whaletacochamp t1_j0h8yik wrote

New employee of mine moved here from LA in January last year. The first week she was here we had a few days of negative temps and a huge dumping of snow. She called me crying from her driveway saying that she didn't know this would be so challenging, her car was stuck, she didn't have a shovel, she didn't even know snow tires were a thing until that very day. She was spiraling and basically finally just said "i don't know how you guys do it, this place is like hell, like a really fucking cold and slippery hell!"

I told her to please take the day, and that the next time she worked we would go over some advice for dealing with snow and cold.

I just went to check in with her about this storm and she is currently outside without a jacket trying to catch snowflakes. I think we won her over, guys.

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thestateisgreen t1_j0l5pj7 wrote

This is so typical, and also hilarious. “Don’t like the weather? Wait 5 minutes!”

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Vermontess OP t1_j0goem9 wrote

Have a really vivid memory of snow lightning during a 3’ storm when I was about 9. Took a lantern to walk to neighbors house at night for some reason and the sky just started exploding with color. Little bro and I stood there for like an hour watching the entire cloudy sky light up bright green, blue, purple. Nature is wild

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Unique-Public-8594 t1_j0gwmkw wrote

Lightening or Northern Lights?

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RoyalAntelope9948 t1_j0iecqz wrote

Me too! I was sleeping over at friends house in Stowe. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was maybe 8 or 9? It was in the 60s.

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TheFillth t1_j0gnlmc wrote

I had slept over at a friend's house back in like 5th grade during a snow storm. We woke up, had pancakes n hot coco and went outside to go sledding. He lived up the side of this mountain and their driveway was only partially drivable during the winter but was the best spot they had for sledding. We make our way down and have to bail at the bottom before it goes into a wooded area and we hear this hollow thump. We see this shiny red area in the snow and realize that his mom's car is completely buried in snow at the bottom of their driveway.

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phred14 t1_j0gprqa wrote

Probably about 20 years ago my wife was away with a friend for a day trip. While she was gone the kids built Isengard in the snow, taking up the whole front yard. When she returned the kids took her on a tour.

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seanner_vt2 t1_j0grbqe wrote

Four years old, stepping off the porch and disappearing into the snow. Completely missed the steps or the fact that fresh powder isn't a true solid surface. Took my mother 10 minutes to stop laughing then another 10 to find me

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bibliophile222 t1_j0gm8jk wrote

When I was a kid, we had a particularly snowy winter (maybe the winter of 1993-94?) and I built a big snow cave to hang out in, which was pretty cool. Also, there was an old track through the woods that used to be a rough road up our very long, steep driveway before my family made a new one right next to it, and one year we had snow followed by freezing rain, so the track formed a super hard crust and basically turned into a luge run. Best. Sledding. EVER.

Sadly, the first snow memory that popped into my head for my adult years wasn't as fun: when I was living in MA, we got a couple feet in one storm and I had to wade through the snow to my gas station job and then shovel for hours. Woot.

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whaletacochamp t1_j0h3rvb wrote

Born in March of '93 and can confirm that it was absurdly snowy. State police almost took my mom to the hospital on a snowmobile. Luckily my grandfather was in the local fire department and took one of their big trucks with chains to bring her in.

There's a pic of my mom standing in the window with me as a newborn, and my dad shoveling snow onto a snow bank that was easily 4x the height of my 5yo sister.

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Cyber_Punk_87 t1_j0shog5 wrote

I lived in Danville that year and it was a super snowy one for sure! We went to the neighbor's for dinner during a storm that dropped 3' of snow and we all piled into dad's plow truck to go across the street (long driveway) because he knew he'd need to plow us back in.

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Unique-Public-8594 t1_j0girhx wrote

Sledding by ourselves down a mountain trail.

Elmore’s Polar Plunge.

Driving through a wooded area while it’s snowing and the snow flakes are extra large and there is no wind so they seem to float down slowly.

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Unique-Public-8594 t1_j0gw477 wrote

As a young child, walking along a nicely shoveled path in which the sides went up to over my head.

Same storm… we made square snow shoveled areas connected by normal snow shoveled paths to create “houses” with snow benches in them.

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MizLucinda t1_j0hizkj wrote

A lot of people mentioned the Valentine storm from several years ago. That was a fun snowstorm. It was fluffy snow and it was fun to play in!

Conversely, I drove through the worst snowstorm on record in Erie, PA a few years ago, trying to get back to Vermont. It snowed something like 5 feet in 2 hours. Absolutely not recommended.

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vaporeng t1_j0gpf1s wrote

Last year after a crappy stretch of weather, paradise at mrg was closed. Over the next week they got a couple storms totaling about 20 inches. I happened to be there on a weekday morning when it opened back up. I had been planning on taking just one run when it opened but after getting knee high freshies the whole way down, I took several more laps. I think there was like one other skier. I actually made some powder eights with my own tracks from the previous run. That was one of my best ski days ever.

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xgrave_rotx t1_j0gr82a wrote

The big 3’ snow storm we had 2 years ago, I got the day off of work and dressed up as Elsa and sang let it go in the snow in my front yard (I was a little cold out there)

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halfbakedblake t1_j0hyg6h wrote

We used have to have a driveway in the middle of a good size hill. We had done construction there and it was big. Water would pool in maybe a 20x20 patch and freeze into a private skate rink.

One ice storm when I was six ish I remember that son of a bitch plowman came by and sprayed salt far enough to ruin half my rink. As all self respecting 6 year olds can affirm, I was outraged. I immediately gave the driver the finger.

Fast forward until my dad came home. Apparently he knew the town plow guy, being small town Vermont and I got a spanking.

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wholeWheatButterfly t1_j0ing07 wrote

For some reason the one that always comes to mind is when my sister and I walked down to the video rental store, in all our gear, and got some movies and had a movie marathon.

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mysticcoffeeroaster t1_j0h6o02 wrote

When I was a kid, we lived towards the bottom of a hill on a curve with our neighbors with kids our age directly across the street. The curve was such that when the plow came around, most of the snow was deposited on the neighbor's side of the street. They had a colonial split-rail type of fence along the street and the snow bank piled higher than the fence in a good storm. One very snowy snow-day, a bunch of us neighborhood kids learned that the fence actually provided a decent support for a snow tunnel. We each dug our own forts into the snow bank through the horizontal planks of the fence, and had an epic snowball fight.

Then we realized it was much more fun to connect each of our forts so we could actually talk to each other (at least to our adjacent neighbors). We left archways between compartments to designate boundaries of our "properties". The happy accident, I think, was the arches provided better support for the whole structure. There were 4 or 5 of us, each with our own room that we could sit up in and just about lay down in head to foot inside our own spaces, and also crawl in between. Once our parents realized what we were up to, and always thinking about safety, they made us wall up any entrances on the streetside so that we could only crawl in from the safety of the neighbor's yard. It was the '70s.

The tunnel survived nearly the entire Winter and as time went on, our breath condensed on the inside and iced up the walls and floors. And we poured water on the outside to ice up the outside walls to make them "stronger". We also found that we could enter the room at the top of the hill and slide down the tunnel on our bellies all the way to the end. This was paradise for a kid!

As Winter wore on, parents issued additional rules, like no playing in the tunnel when it was snowing due to the possibility of a snow plow coming by and collapsing the tunnel. And no climbing on top. But that tunnel never collapsed and remained structurally sound until probably late February / early March. That was probably the most magical Winter of my childhood.

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madamefa t1_j0h89ex wrote

I’m an elder Redditor - growing up in Burlington we rarely got a snow day because most schools were still walkable (most have since closed). In 1978 we got a foot and a half on Christmas which was magical! Later I recall a stretch in the 90s/early 2000s where we’d get a huge storm in March and even April.

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Fantastic_Painter_15 t1_j0hib7b wrote

The Valentine’s Day storm years back was legendary. Our driveway couldn’t get plowed for like 3 days, then the town had to send literal construction equipment to move the snow since a regular plow couldn’t handle it.

Snow was so high I was jumping off my parents roof into the massive snowbanks (normally about a 25ft drop). Spent days afterwards building so many sick snow forts in the snowbanks and launching off ski jumps we built in the backyard.

Genuinely don’t think we’ve had a comparable storm since then

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cho_bits t1_j0itt10 wrote

There are definitely some outliers that come to mind… the Valentine’s Day Blizzard was epic! There was also the Halloween week storm a few years before that, that’s the earliest snow day I can remember. We also had one in April in the early 2000s.

Also, not a snow day but there was the day that the whole Chittenden East district had off because some kids broke into the MMU bus garage and unplugged the buses from their heaters, because diesel engines can’t start cold. (The crazy part is I don’t think anyone was ever caught? Granted it was before social media so fewer places to brag about it…)

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RoseGold-Bubbles1333 t1_j0iuc4o wrote

The blizzard of 78 I was 9 and we jumped and sledded off roofs because of the snow drifts, built snow caves and igloos and just had a blast. It took a week before the Street I grew up on was plowed so it was just a crazy wonderland.

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pondusedtobeupthere t1_j0iwcpy wrote

Seeing folks going down Route 7 on their cross-country skis. Or snowmobiles. Taking a broom to bush snow off each other after playing/sledding for hours. Putting mittens and hats on the radiator to dry. Coming inside to hot chocolate with red cheeks and runny noses. Fingers and toes almost frozen and them tingling as they warmed up. Hanging up snow pants by their suspenders in the bathroom to drip dry. Driving by Middlebury College frat ice sculptures. Learning to ski on the College golf course.

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Cyber_Punk_87 t1_j0siczq wrote

I've got a couple I can remember:

The winter of '95-'96 I lived in Danville and we had this big long driveway that used to drift at the end. We'd gotten some snow and quite a bit of wind, so the bottom was all drifted, probably 5' deep. Dad decides to take me to school in his plow truck and just plow on the way out. Well, he underestimated how deep the snow was and pretty soon there's just a 7' tall snowbank at the end of the driveway that he can't move. I ran up to the house to call my best friend to see if they could come pick me up at the end of the driveway but no answer. So I had to walk to school (about a mile), including climbing over that 7' drift. Mom called and let them know I'd be late but was on my way...

The second one was Valentine's day 2012. We'd gotten a pretty good storm the night before, probably 14" or so. My ex-husband had left a little less than two months earlier, so it was my first winter dealing with all the snow shoveling, etc. on my own (lived in town, so it was manageable, but when you're depressed and heartbroken and broke, it's a lot to deal with). I woke up Valentine's day morning to my dog barking. I looked outside and my neighbor's teenage son was shoveling my walkways for me. I'd lived in that house for almost a decade and had never really met most of my neighbors other than a passing hello, but they obviously noticed I was there alone and it was really touching that they'd do that for me. Still makes me tear up thinking about it. All I could do at the time was stick my head out the door and yell thank you to him.

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Cyber_Punk_87 t1_j0sifqp wrote

Oh, and dad ended up having to call someone with a bucketloader to come clean out the end of the driveway, it was that solid...

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Russian_Rocket23 t1_j0gt0xj wrote

1997 (I feel like it was late October), I had to pick up my buddy in Burlington after a concert and drive back to college in Northern NY. Normally a 3 hour drive, we left Burlington at 11:00 pm and arrived at about 5:30 am. It was impossible to see, so speeds on 89 and route 11 rarely exceeded 20 mph. Somehow I made it to my 9:40 linear algebra class.

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whaletacochamp t1_j0h8ek6 wrote

Back in the day we had to watch the ticker across the bottom of the news channel the morning of in order to know if we had school or not. The 2007 Valentine's storm is the only storm that I remember school being cancelled the night before.

Anyway, I remember there being one morning where I was PISSED that we didn't have a snow day. Definitely seemed worthy of one, but it was maybe 20min before school started and it hadn't been called yet. My friend/neighbor's dad would drive us to school, and as he pulled into my driveway I turned around to look at the TV once more - sure enough our school's name popped up on the screen!

I screamed out to them that school was closed. A few minutes of panic ensued as we decided whether we would immediately begin hanging out/playing in the snow or go back to bed for a bit and meet up later. Of course we got right to it.

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Vermonter623 t1_j0hia6q wrote

The first time I bought a snowmobile. Two days later we had a massive storm. Game changer

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elpvtam t1_j0joku2 wrote

Winter storm Stella 2016. I had gotten my license fairly recently and convinced my mom to let me and my brother go to sugarbush. It was an absolutely epic day, Stella dumped and dumped on the spine, something like 40 inches total over 3 continuous days of snow. Anyways we're skiing in paradise and my dad who was on a business trip outside the country video calls (he must've been confused about the time bc I should've been in school). Somehow there's enough service for a video call. He's like where the hell are you, I say "paradise in a figurative and literal sense" I think he got more than a little jealous.

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Jerry_Williams69 t1_j0jw8rl wrote

Had a snow storm back in 2000 back in Michigan that dumped 48" over 3 days. I haven't seen snow like that since. School was closed for an entire week. All the neighborhood kids had snowball wars pretty much that whole week. If you stepped outside, you were going to get pelted. About half way through the week, I was in a snowball skirmish. Got nailed by a huge snowball so hard that it split my eyebrow open. Turns out I got hit with a fastball from the starting varsity softball pitcher. We hit it off. Dated through high school and college. Ended up getting married. Never expected that we would end up being married with a kid in Vermont when she screwed me up with that snowball back in the day.

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thestateisgreen t1_j0l5jgf wrote

My first pow day in Vermont was in Killington - Easter week 2007. Dumped almost 4ft throughout the few days I was visiting. I was hooked. Moved to the area almost 8 months later and never looked back. I love my life in Vermont.

I ride at Sugarbush now:)

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