At 9 am on a frigid March day, high on a mountain ridge behind the summit of Vermont's northernmost ski resort, it is eerily calm. The storm that blew through last night dropped nearly three feet of powder so light that it swirls into the air when I sneeze. All is hushed. There is only snow and cold and slide of ski. And then suddenly, a howl of laughter as Billy Akens enters the white room. The "white room" is the term some skiers and snowboarders use to describe the phenomenon of riding powder so deep and light that parting it creates a cocoon of snow that envelops the head. Conventional wisdom has it that the white room is a western occurrence, that the mountains of the East simply aren't high and cold enough to give rise to it. But conventional wisdom doesn't factor in at Jay Peak.

Before last winter, I didn't believe the hype. Sure, I'd heard rumors -- Jay gets more snow than Whistler; it has an open-boundary policy similar to Jackson Hole's; people drive all night from Boston or New York, passing dozens of mountains along the way, just to ski Jay -- but I dismissed them as hype and continued pointing the wheels of my Toyota pickup at mountains closer to my Vermont home. But the rumors were enough to make me curious.

I began to pay attention and noticed a pattern in the snow reports: When mountains just an hour or two to the south -- the very mountains I frequented -- got rain, Jay got snow. When those mountains got five inches, Jay got 10. And when they got a foot...well, you get the picture. Couple that with Jay's progressive backcountry policy and low skier-per-acre ratio (annual skier visits are up 20,000 in the past five years, but at 160,000, they're still low), and I figured it was time to see if the rumors held any heft. Besides, with Jay about to embark on an ambitious expansion that will bring lift access to 250 acres of prime terrain, I knew I had to act fast to beat the masses.

My biggest stroke of luck occurred at the end of my first day at Jay, when I met Akens and Chris Casey at the bar in the base lodge. "Have a good day?" Akens asked. Yes, I said. "You should come ski with us tomorrow," he said. "You'll have a better day." I'd gotten that sort of invitation before, but never from two guys who've shared an uninsulated one-room yurt for the past eight years just because it allows them to rack up 125-day ski seasons and not have to worry about mortgage or utility expenses. "I do everything I can to keep my cost of living low," says Akens, who is in his mid-30s. "Earning money only distracts me from skiing."

That's exactly the kind of ethos Jay Peak has cultivated, giving rise to a sort of anti-scene that values skiing and riding -- and especially powder skiing and riding in the backcountry -- above all else. You do not travel to Jay to party, woo women, or shop after a morning of cruising groomed runs. That the mountain has thrived in the absence of an Aspen- or Killington-like après shopping and party scene is testament to its uniqueness in a region renowned for snow reports that are little more than an optimistic grading of ice.

Jay lies directly in a storm corridor that blesses the mountain with snow of such quantity and quality that many western skiers would be envious. Over the 2000-2001 season, it received a record 571 inches of snow, and its annual average is 355. That's nine inches more than Vail and just five inches less than Whistler. (So the rumors are only slightly exaggerated.) In a region where most ski resorts make do with 150 to 250 inches annually, Jay Peak is nothing short of a freak of nature.

That's due to what meteorologist Jim Roemer, who runs a ski-specific online forecasting service called bestskiweather.com, calls the "Jay Cloud." "It's not uncommon for Jay to get twice as much snow as other mountains only an hour away," Roemer says. "Most other New England mountains are shadowed by peaks to the east or west, which steal a lot of their snow." But Jay just sticks up there, all by itself. It gets the nor'easters from the east and the lake effect from the west. It couldn't be situated better.

Of course, all the snow on Everest won't do any good if it falls on flat ground. And that's how Jay plays its second hand. Among eastern resorts, it was the first to recognize and embrace off-piste skiing, a philosophy that, combined with Jay's challenging terrain and abundant snowfall, has led many to compare it to Jackson Hole. "For so many years, we were like other resorts and operated under this constricted mantra of reducing liability," says Bill Stenger, Jay Peak's president and general manager. "It was getting antiseptic, and it was obvious something needed to change." That something was the inauguration of the off-trail and beyond-boundary skiing and riding that began nearly two decades ago and has evolved into the resort's main draw. Jay now has more than 1,000 acres of accessible backcountry. "Everyone thought people were going to get killed," says Stenger. "But you know what? We have more injuries on the trails than in the woods."

Stenger's philosophy has drawn hardcore skiers and riders such as Akens and Casey. And it also entices recreational skiers away from their home mountains and trips out West. "I was going west to ski every year at Jackson or Big Sky or Park City," says Dirk Anderson, a central Vermonter who regularly racks up 80-day seasons. "And then I finally figured out that eight days out of 10, I was getting better conditions at Jay, an hour and a half from my house."

Anderson says that Jay provides expert skiers and riders unique opportunities to venture far beyond the resort's designated boundaries. And true to their promise, Akens and Casey made sure I experienced them. They led me to the backcountry peak of Big Jay, where we aimed our fat powderboards down the 35-degree slope and sliced lines through 2,000 vertical feet of birch and spruce. They threw me down the Dip, a moderately angled apron of thinned woods that deposits powder-choked skiers and riders onto Route 242, where they pile into pickup trucks and minivans for the three-minute ride back to the base area. Then there are official gladed runs such as André's Paradise (formerly Beyond Beaver Pond), Face Chutes, and Timbuktu. It's not that terrain this steep and unpolished doesn't exist at other eastern mountains; it's just that Jay consistently gets the snowfall it takes to sustain it. Sure, Jackson Hole's immense size and sheer vertical drops dwarf Jay, but the feel of the two mountains, the omnipresent sense of wild and surprise and pure giddiness, is pretty damn similar.