Worldwide attention for Vance visit, snow reporter Lucy Welch steals the spotlight
Vice President JD Vance’s visit to The Valley to ski Sugarbush led to protests in Warren and Waitsfield and at various road intersections along the way. The protests were vocal and lively and made national and international news reports on Saturday and Sunday, March 1 and 2.
Protesters began gathering in Waitsfield around 8:30 a.m. and in Warren about the same time. Vance’s motorcade headed to the mountain at approximately the same time that morning with some protestors stationed at the intersection of Bragg and Stagecoach Roads.
Vice Presidential protesters and supporters in Warren, Vermont on March 1. Photo by Sarah Hughes
UKRAINIAN FLAGS
By 9:00 a.m. the sidewalks in Waitsfield were filling up and people were standing two and three deep with signs and chants and Ukrainian flags. That number swelled to well over a thousand, possibly two thousand at the height of the demonstration that saw people lined up five-deep on both sides of the street and cars honking and waving their own signs and flags. The protests stretched from the intersection of Routes 17/100 north beyond Carroll Road and into historical Waitsfield Village.
Pictures and videos of the protests went viral as they began to be uploaded online. The Valley Reporter saw 156,000 impressions on Facebook and 23,000 on Instagram as well as close to 100,000 impressions on Twitter/X. Mad River Valley Television took two short videos of the projects, which had been viewed over 40,000 times on YouTube as of Monday, March 3, at midday.
Ukrainian flags and colors were on full display at the Indivisible Mad River Valley's protest on Saturday, March 1. Photo: David Garten
Skiing protests on the mountain at Sugarbush on March 1 in response to JD Vance's visit. Photo: Susie Conrad
The Vance family left The Valley late morning on Sunday in its motorcade, encountering protesters near the Burlington Airport on the way out of town. In news reports this week, Vance said he barely noticed the protestors.
And while folks were making signs and planning to protest, Sugarbush’s snow reporter Lucy Welch was quietly writing a snow report that took Vance and the Trump administration to task for its cavalier attitude towards the environment, diversity, equity, global warming, massive federal firings, international aid and more.
That snow report, posted and emailed to subscribers at 6:31 a.m. (followed by a shorter recording on the resort’s snowline) were removed from the resort’s website fairly quickly, but not before screengrabs and shares sent her words around the world at the speed of the internet.
There was fear that Welch would be fired for her stealth activism, but that was not the case, she returned to work on March 8.
Here’s two paragraphs from the end of her snow report:
“Therefore, I am using my relative “platform” as snow reporter, to be disruptive – I don’t have a whole lot to lose. We are living in a really scary and really serious time. What we do or don’t do, matters. This whole shpiel probably won’t change a whole lot, and I can only assume that I will be fired, but at least this will do even just a smidge more than just shutting up and being a sheep.
I am really scared for our future. Acting like nothing is happening here feels way scarier than losing my job. I want to have kids one day, and I want to teach them to ski. The policies and ideals of the current Administration, however, are not conducive to either of these things, because, at least how things look now, I’d never be able to afford a good life for a child anyway, and snow will be a thing of Vermont history.
So please, for the sake of our future shredders: Be Better Here.”
Valley voters gather for Town Meeting
Nothing says March like the annual ritual of Town Meeting with budgets, potlucks, school budgets, and capital reserve funds. This year voters passed a $49,209,927 budget for the school district. Moretown voters passed their town budget of $1,859,294 and voted to join the Mad River Valley Recreation District. Waitsfield voters approved a budget of $2,795,116 while Warren voters passed a budget of $4,128,677.
Fayston voters passed a budget of $1,843,877 and Duxbury passed a budget of $1.31 million.
HU boys’ hockey takes D2 Vermont state championship
On Sunday, March 9, 2025, Harwood Union's boys' varsity hockey team faced off against U-32 at Gutterson Fieldhouse, clinching a hard-fought victory with a 4-2 score to become the Vermont State D2 Champions. Harwood emerged as the dominant team in the final showdown. The game underscored the competitive nature of the rivalry between Harwood and U-32, as many players had previously faced each other in youth hockey. Coach Migonis described the match as a mix of friendly rivalry and fierce competition, with both teams playing hard, knowing the stakes were high.
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