Who Can Ski Vermont?

“So Vermont has pulled up the drawbridge,” extreme skier Dan Egan said with a laugh as I spoke with him by phone in November. Egan was polishing off his new book, Skiing in a White Haze (an exclusive first excerpt is in this issue) and getting ready to head to Montana. This was days after a number of major news outlets ran stories detailing the state’s travel restrictions and discussing the impending impact on skiing.

What Egan and, judging from the number of calls we got, many others have missed is that Vermont’s travel restrictions in December 2020 are no different than they were in April or August. Unless you were coming from a county that had a very low Covid-19 count (under 400 cases per million), you were required to quarantine for 14 days before arriving. Or quarantine for 7 days, if you have a negative test result.

What has changed is that as cases began to spread, few counties in the Lower 48 (at present) have that low, under-400 per million case count.

“That doesn’t mean we have to quarantine too, we live here!” one second home-owner who regularly crosses state borders told me. A moderator of a popular Facebook group insisted that because he was “working media”  he could travel from New York to Vermont as he pleased. 

Sorry,  but the answer to both of those is the same one I tell guests who try to book my Airbnb: there are no exceptions.

You can still ski. And we want you here.

It’s just this: if you love to ski, quarantine, for Pete’s sake. Get tested. Be careful. Yes, that means masks. Yes, that means no parking lot parties, no bar-hopping (bars here are closed) or après. But it also means that you can have a ski season. And we can too. If we all follow these guidelines, we won’t face the shutdowns that European resorts are seeing.

And there will be powder for all. —Lisa Lynn, Editor

Eds. note: We have heard from Matthew Bramble, whom we have covered in past articles , that he felt that this article is about him and unjustly accuses him of not quarantining. He has asked for a retraction. In no place does this refer to Mr. Bramble nor does this accuse Mr. Bramble or anyone of violating quarantine guidelines. We stand by its accuracy.