2: 37 P.M. AND JAY BOUND
“I’m feeling the push,” Cash says as we rolled out of Stowe. “I’m feeling the burn—I’m not kidding.” At
3:08 we got stuck in traffic in downtown Morrisville, and making it to Jay in time seemed like a pipe
dream. It was time to turn it up a notch.
Cash punched it and darted through a parking lot, a shortcut to avoid the backed up cars, and poked
back out onto 100 at the edge of town. Cash’s windshield washer was broken, and the windshield was
pasted with salt. Soon we were stuck behind a roadside-cleaning truck going 10 mph below the speed
limit. We passed him, blazed through Hyde Park, then Lowell, before a car broke down right in front of
us. “I’ve come too far!” Cash yelled and swerved to avoid the sputtering vehicle.
Tick, tick, tick…the clock was running. We pulled into Jay, tires spinning on a sandy corner and
blasted over to the Jet Triple. BOOM! At 3: 57 we rolled up to the lift. Three minutes to spare. Who
would have thought it would come to this? Once at the summit of the triple, we barely had the energy
to keep it together to make slow deliberate turns down arrow-straight Jet to the bottom, with the sun
now falling behind the 3,986-foot main mountain. We convened at the bottom to celebrate with Tram
Ales (Jay’s special brew, made by Long Trail) and hit the road again.
Driving the final leg home, I realized that in three short years of Green Mountain living I’d been
to every ski area in Vermont, with the exception of Middlebury College’s Snow Bowl. How many
people can say that? And after each outing, I return home with a deeper appreciation for Vermont’s
mountains – and the miles of road that link them together.
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