Here is the winter forecast from Ray's Weather in the Mountain of N.C. CHECK IT OUT AND GET READY TO DRESS WARMLY!!
http://raysweather.com/WinterForecast2004.php

The Colonel

Wow! I was in there through half of your post but lost it after that. Correct me if I am wrong but, it sounds like it is supposed to be a GOOD year whenever it gets started. Anyway thanks COL. any positive inputs at this time are appreciated! I plan to be in 7 Springs, 2 Jan and would like to do a few day trips to Wintergreen before that but, like all of us, we are waiting....patiently.

[Correction: Maybe not so patiently), but waiting none the less for this weather pattern to turn around.

Thanks Again for the Optimism, we all need it!

Lots of fun to read such stuff; always is. But I don't think any of them have a credible way to predict the big problem with eastern winters; freeze - thaw cycles. Maybe that's what he means by "troughiness". How many and how severe determines the quality of an eastern ski year far better than average temp. or total snowfall. A case in point is the incredible New England 2000-2001 season. From early Jan. until late march it never reached the freezing point. VT skiers forgot the sound of edges on ice. We skied backcountry lines that hadn't been skied in 50 years. On one such trip I marveled at the openness of the woods and the one guy who'd been there before, a native Vermonter said, "This is a dense thicket; we're skiing over the tops of 30 foot tall trees."