This season was a weird one. I’m not sure my driveway was plowed more than twice, but 15 minutes from my Vermont home, there was plenty of snow in the Green Mountains. For much of the season, it just took some searching to find. That is until spring came. Late February brought an apocalyptic storm to Vermont—three feet in a weekend, six in a week—followed by a summer-like heat wave, then a whirlwind of travel from Switzerland to Oregon and back home.

Bolton Valley Resort’s 5,000 acres of wild backcountry land sit waiting for skiers to break trail and carve turns. But last winter, the resort’s developers put more than 1,000 acres of their land on the market. With the threat of development and restricted access looming, it’s a race to raise enough money to buy the land and preserve its twisting canvas of backcountry terrain.

Paul Parker literally wrote the book on freeheel skiing. But for the past 16 years, he’s been designing and developing AT and telemark boots for Garmont. I sat down to breakfast with Paul Parker to talk AT boots, hot trends and carbon fiber.

April 2, 2012—Backcountry Magazine editor Drew Pogge earned top honors at the 2011 Northern Lights Awards, held this week in San Francisco, CA. His story, Stone Cold—about a pioneering ski mountaineering expedition into the Yukon’s frigid Tombstone Mountains—appeared in the December 2011 issue of Backcountry.

For the tenth year, skiers from throughout the Northeast traveled to Keene Valley, NY in early March for the annual Adirondack Backcountry SkiFest. Glen Plake was among the attendees, each of whom soaked in a weekend of sunshine, instructional clinics and ski tours.

Whew. Gear Test Week is over. It’s 10 p.m. on Sunday night, and the remains of the team are boxing up gear. Seeing the mounds of skis in the conference room, it seems unbelievable that we managed to get through it all. But thanks to the taskmasters on the BCM staff and the 50 testers, we motored through every piece of 2013 gear.