A RUGGED LADY   IN A FUR COAT

SO A COUPLE OF NATURALISTS ARE UP AT THE RABBIT’S NEST, a tiny shack below the Nose, on Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak. It is summer. They’re studying the Bicknell’s thrush, a rare songbird that prefers to nest above 3,000 feet. Ears peeled for its flute-like call, they begin to notice a sawing sound. Huh? They set off through a dense tangle of fir and spruce. After a while, they come across Christian Strong, who is limbing one of his favorite secret slots through the woods. The bust made the local paper the following week.

Strong told me this story as we rode Stowe’s high-speed FourRunner quad chair up Mansfield’s flank. The quad shoots skiers so quickly up the mountain’s 2,150-vertical-foot rise, leaving them just below the Nose, that there isn’t much time for yarn-spinning. It’s one of the most efficient vert-delivery systems in North America, a virtual elevator to the steepest, most sustained, and most direct fall lines in the East—and to a clandestine matrix of portals and powder stashes in the woods that rival lines in the West.

Toothy and a little googly-eyed, with a slightly battered, cynical air, Strong brings to mind the Paul Giamatti character in Sideways, except the expertise is birch glades and deep snow rather than wine. I’d asked about the Rabbit’s Nest, and Strong, in the time-honored Stowe tradition of revealing nothing of such whereabouts, had deflected by tattling on himself. (His sentence, in lieu of a fine, was some hard time doing maintenance on the Long Trail, which runs the length of Vermont.)

Strong is a Stowe native who’d recently hung out a surreptitious shingle as a guide. “Ski With a Local!!!!” his business card read, with a photo of him tit-deep in a sunlit powder field that didn’t look like anything I’d ever come across in Vermont. He is one of the last of the old guard—a holdover from the 1980s when farmers and tycoons, dirt bags and Bognerites all celebrated a mutual love for sliding over snow at the greatest