Off-season rain is a tease, a tickle. It plasters the windows, the hills, cars, roads, chairlifts. You stare out through the gloomy gray, check the temperature, and do the math: Another twenty degrees and this would be snow…another thirty and it’s blower…one inch of rain equals a foot of snow…four inches already today, if it were January that would be…oh my God.

The world has rhythms. Sometimes we sense them, sometimes we don’t, but one inescapable to skiers is the glorious spring cycle of melt and freeze and melt again. Warm days and cold nights massage the snowpack, work out the kinks, break down the layers between November rain and December freeze and January thaw and February dumps, leaving delicious uniformity.

We exist in an almost infinitesimally small slice of all possible temperatures. On a scale that ranges from -949 degrees Fahrenheit at absolute zero to 27 million degrees at the core of the sun, we live within just 100 degrees, give or take. And yet, as skiers and snowboarders and winter hedonists, we are as attuned to the subtleties of heat and cold as the finest calibrated thermometer.

I want it to snow and never stop. I want big black storm clouds—not those wimpy gray ones—to cover the land from here to the horizon and beyond. I want flakes the size of dinner plates, blizzards that last for weeks, and powder so deep you need spelunking gear if you lose a ski. I’m only satisfied by “storms of the century”—and I’d be even happier with storms of the millennium.