In early February, the outdoor sports website Teton Gravity Research posted a video of a skier plunging down an alpine chute in thigh-deep powder, slaloming through evergreens and yelping with joy as clumps of snow pelted his goggles.

It was typical midwinter fare for the site, except that the skier wasn’t at Alta or Squaw Valley or any of the other big name, high altitude Western resorts. He was at tiny Mad River Glen in Fayston, Vt., a ski area a mere 3,600 feet in elevation. The accompanying headline put it bluntly: “The East Coast Is the Best Place to Ski Right Now.”

As back-to-back snowstorms have engulfed the Northeast over the past three weeks, taxing the area’s collective shoveling strength, ski resorts in Vermont and New Hampshire have witnessed a curious phenomenon for New England: powder. And lots of it. As of Feb. 23 more than 261 inches of snow has fallen at the Jay Peak Resort in Vermont; Stowe and Stratton have gotten 225 and 144 inches, respectively; and at Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire, three feet of snow accumulated in the first half of February alone.

Compare that with the measly total of 115 inches at Park City, Utah, or to Sun Valley, Idaho’s 113 inches. From Jackson Hole to Whistler-Blackcomb, maddening warm spells have Western powder-hounds tearing their hair out, while in the Northeast, parts of which have started to resemble the Khumbu Icefall, skiers and snowboarders are beginning to talk of an epic year.