Snow making...

In the 1940s and '50s my Father - and me - panned for gold in a brook east of Mt. Killington known as Gold Brook - its water was pure and clear and biting cold year-round, and getting to it it was a stunning walk through a verdant under-canopy of beautiful, velvet-floored forests and old-growth trees - as old as America, plus it, Gold Brook, curled through the valley and then plunged over what certainly must be Vermont's longest waterfall, and if you got tired of panning for gold and not finding any, there was always fishing for the big rainbows and native brown trout.

Fast forward, no longer would the ranger atop Killington be lonely as the majestic peak was turned into a playground for the rich at the expense of the environment. Snow-making machines drank/drink up the aquifer and the runoff rages down the hillsides and rushes into the surrounding streams, re-enter Gold Brook which now - half a century later, runs white, white as 2 per cent milk, a nasty translucent bluish hue in which, in my opinion, no fish swim.

And even that was 20 odd years ago so by now maybe the ski industry has found its collective conscience and perhaps Gold Brook runs clear again?