EAST CORINTH — A few weeks ago, Ben Nalette, a freshman alpine skier at Thetford Academy, was using rub-on hard wax to try to coax his skis into better shape for the dicey cover at Northeast Slopes.

Rain had made the main face of the hill slick with ice. But he saw on Facebook that the groomers had managed to make it shred-able, and hustled over.

“It’s a small hill, but it’s a nice hill,” said Nalette, whose family lives in Corinth. “It’s steep, and there are a lot of ridges and bumps, fun features.”

Northeast Slopes, a nonprofit ski area open sometimes on Wednesdays and weekends on Route 25 in East Corinth has been, as its maxim suggests, “keeping skiing real since 1936.”

For a motorist heading west, the hill is just after a threateningly slanted silo. With $15 day passes and no ability to make their own snow (the best they can do is tell people to keep their fingers crossed), the organization has branded itself as the authentic and affordable option for central Vermont skiers and snowboarders.

While some mountains that create their own snow can largely groom over the impacts of an erratic winter, Northeast Slopes — which doesn’t have anything in the way of a snow gun — is victim to it. When the snowpack is sturdy enough, the hill’s army of volunteers can crank up the T-bar and two rope tows. The “little tow” is run out of the engine of a disemboweled 1973 Dodge Dart.

But the Northeast Slopes’ ephemeral opening times come and go like a vernal pond.

As climate change continues to remake New England’s seasons, annual snowpack is dwindling, said Beverley Wemple, a professor of geography and geosciences at the University of Vermont, in an interview.

“We know that when it’s warmer we’re right on the threshold of precipitation falling as rain or snow,” Wemple said. “In the historical past, our winters have typically been cool enough to rely on snowfall all winter, to support our economies and our ecological processes.”

Now, “we’re often over that threshold,” she said, and more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow. An “El Niño” year, when temperatures are warmer across the globe due to increased ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific, the snowpack this season was hit with “a double whammy,” Wemple said.

This year marked the warmest winter on record in St. Johnsbury and Woodstock, according to the National Weather Service, and the second warmest in Montpelier.

The high temperatures largely kept shredders off the runs at Northeast Slopes. According to the ski area’s volunteer coordinator, Wade Pierson, a dozen days of skiing there as of this week mark one of the worst seasons in memory.

The organization ends almost every year in the red, board member Justin Putnam said. At major ski resorts such as Killington and Stowe, a single day of skiing can cost the same, or more, than the $150 season pass at Northeast Slopes. But while artificial snow allows the resorts to plow through March, the ski season is perpetually uncertain in Corinth.

Still, “it ain’t over ‘till it’s over,” a Facebook post doggedly reads, announcing that the hill had once again closed due to paltry snow cover.

In February, Caitlin Ladabouche, of Barre, Vt., made the trip south to take her eighth-grade son to Northeast Slopes. Ladabouche grew up skiing at Pico and over Thanksgiving, she was thinking of taking her family to the Rutland, Vt. mountain. But a day pass “for one trail groomed with made snow” was $80, she said.

Instead, they played indoor golf, for around the same price — total.

Northeast Slopes keeps ticket costs low on purpose. What they try to offer that the larger mountains can’t is community, and as a requisite, affordability — accomplished through sheer force of volunteer will. The upfront costs of buying snow-making equipment, and the electricity required to make it all go, could make it virtually impossible to offer passes at their current prices.

But the hill can’t change the fact that the season is dwindling on both sides, hemmed in by a lingering fall and an aggressive spring. These days, a more dependable skiing season is available only to the people who can buy it.

Shoe box snow

By necessity, Pierson, the unofficial manager of Northeast Slopes, has become an aficionado of a particularly resourceful kind of grooming.

“Above the rope tow, shadows retain good piles of snow,” he explained. “When I get desperate, I go up there with a Sno-Cat and start scooping it out.” Then Pierson hauls it down onto the face. Snowpack there can be as thin as a bedsheet, but he’s just got to “go out into the woods, and there’s a foot and a half of snow,” he said.

Pierson has deep roots at the hill. The T-bar, erected in 2009 — in an effort to keep the hill on the map — is named after his father, Jon Pierson. The elder Pierson is praised in a dedicating plaque for his “unerring calm and goodwill,” as well as his “humility and strength.” He died just months before the T-bar opened.

Now Pierson runs an advertisement once a week on WDEV, a Waterbury, Vt., radio station. “We pulled snow out of a shoe box for you guys,” his voice said over the radio waves in an end of February ad. The station used to broadcast from Northeast Slopes on opening days.

In his free time, Pierson watches livestreams of ski hills in Minnesota and Levi, Finland (the latter one being “perfect, because if I turn it on in the morning it’s already noon there,” he said), taking notes on things he’d like to implement back home that might make his own hill more resilient as natural snow is harder to come by.

But in the face of needed adaptations, Northeast Slopes is defined by its long history.

In 1936, George Eaton, president of the Bradford Winter Sports Club, was struck when he came upon farmer Gene Eastman’s sloping pasture on his way to Montpelier. A bad December for snow, with every ski-able hill barren, Eastman’s land was covered with a half-foot of powder.

A handshake agreement between farmer and skier set Northeast Slopes on its course. For 25 years, Eastman groomed the hill for skiers with a spike tooth field harrow hooked up to a pair of workhorses.

Decades later, as “skyrocketing liability insurances” took a toll on community ski hills and skiers headed for bigger mountains with chairlifts, the financial picture became bleak. In 1986, the nonprofit was formed to keep the small-town ski slope viable.

Beetlejuice, the Tim Burton cult classic filmed in Corinth in the late 1980s, also looms large in town memory. The iconic red covered bridge that actress Geena Davis drives a car through, sending her to the world of the “recently deceased,” houses the base of the Northeast Slopes rope tows.

Last summer, the Beetlejuice sequel, scheduled to be released in September, was filmed in Corinth. The parts from a bridge in the latest cinematic addition were repurposed to build a new pavilion at the ski hill.

In all seasons, “juicers,” as the franchise’s mega-fans are called, show up to Northeast Slopes with cameras, occasionally mingling with the students sent there on wintry Fridays by St. Monica-St. Michael, a Catholic elementary and middle school in Barre, and Corinth’s Waits River Valley School.

In February, middle-schoolers taking a break from the action watched through the window from the lodge, which affords a view of the entire slope. They leaned their phones up against the glass to take videos, commenting on near-collisions and ambitious near-tricks.

“Everyone’s like a family,” 13-year-old Jordan Cutter said. “It feels very much like a community,” added classmate Ranee Hall. Both attend Waits River Valley.

Someone in a group of adolescents eating burgers inside the warming shack had failed to properly place their skis on the outdoor rack.

“You know what the guy working here 50 years ago would do?” Pierson asked, addressing them all. “First warning, one ski on the roof. Second warning, the other ski on the roof.”

Pierson’s grooming, which he calls “snow farming,” has seen Northeast Slopes through the worst of the winter.

But despite evidence to the contrary, Pierson said he lacks “the patience or perseverance” to be a top-notch groomer. When it’s hard snow, he has to move at a “snail’s pace,” and do a lot of grinding, he said.

At the end of February, he had “covered up one really ugly spot,” and what could have been a busted weekend drew a big crowd. But the grueling effort was disheartening. “On a good year, we ski until April Fool’s Day,” he said.

‘A dinosaur’

Across New England, the price of a day of skiing is soaring.

Hills like Northeast Slopes, and Cochran’s Ski Area in Richmond, Vt. — also a nonprofit (that has turned out a fleet of Olympians) with a large network of volunteers — are stretching themselves thin to keep access to skiing equitable.

Plus, the network of volunteers is dwindling. “We usually just see the same faces,” Putnam said. Finding people willing to keep the slope running “is probably the most daunting task,” he said. “We’re trying to be really conscious of burnout.”

Putnam recalled showing up to Northeast Slopes after school with his buddies. Someone would run the rope tow, waiting his turn while the others hit the slopes.

With electricity and insurance costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, breaking even can be a challenge. “We’re happy if we see $500 in revenue in a day,” said Putnam, the Northeast Slopes board member.

But Corinth doesn’t do it alone — other towns make a point of chipping in. At Town Meeting this month, Bradford residents voted to appropriate $2,790 to the organization.

Still, “we’re certainly not going to be building up any surpluses to make improvements,” Putnam said. A lot of repairs just come out of someone’s pocket, and usually quietly, he said.

“It’s been a challenge,” he said of this season. When it comes time for a post-mortem, “We’re all going to look at this year and think ‘are we in trouble?’”

Bad winters might “force” the mountain to go the way of snow-making equipment, he said. A shelved plan includes purchasing old machinery from a mountain down south where Putnam has some friends.

“Maybe this place is just a dinosaur,” he said, “a lasting image of how things used to be.”

But if it’s a dinosaur, Northeast Slopes skiers young and old would argue that it’s not yet time for the hill to go extinct.

Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.