We’re getting yet another foot of snow at Sugarloaf this weekend. I can’t believe how much it has snowed this winter. Our total accumulation for the winter is now well over 100 inches. It’s the snowiest winter in over 30 years.

A lot of people say they are tired of it, but there are many people, like my family, who have figured out how to enjoy the snow.  We enjoy skiing as a family, and my boys are involved with competitive ski racing. My husband Jay is a weekend coach in the Sugarloaf/Carrabassett Valley Academy program. My son Jamie headed out at 8 this morning to ski the “pow” which is slang for “powder,” or “powdah” as some Mainers would say.

Yesterday I met my friend Vici Robinson and hiked into the new Hut in Carrabassett Valley. We saw Steve Minich and his cameraman, Kevin, who were producing a news story for WMTW News about the Huts and Trails with Alexa Dayton and Dave Herring. Alexa is the Marketing Manager and Dave is the Executive Director. They’re great people and they’ve got a big job ahead of them launching this exciting system of 12 huts from the Mahoosuc Mountains to Mooshead Lake across the state of Maine.

We saw Jamie Corriveau at the hut. He is the operations manager for the hut system and is very excited to be back in Carrabassett Valley after an extended hiatus. Back in the 70s and 80s, he worked for Peter Webber as his pilot and manager of the Sugarloaf Inn. Peter is my husband Jay’s uncle, so Jamie was involved with the extended family including Nana Webber, who was my husband’s grandmother and my inlaws, Dick and Joan Marshall.  He loves to reminisce about the old days of flying the family around and working at the Sugarloaf Inn, which Peter owned with his wife Martha. She passed away at the young age of 51 in 1996 after fighting Breast Cancer. Peter has devoted his life to building the Martha B. Webber Breast Cancer Center in Farmington at Franklin Memorial Hospital.

 Jamie told me about a group that had just stayed at the Carrabassett Valley Hut from Johnson and Wales College in Rhode Island. The group was guided by Russell Walters of Northern Outdoors Adventure Resort, one of my former clients.  Jamie told me that one of the girls had found the experience of staying at the hut to be among the high points of her lifetime. She had called her mom in NJ to tell her about stargazing from the Maine Woods where the sky was so clear. The mom asked her daughter if there was anything that the family could do for the hut and the girl said they could use a telescope. So Jamie thinks they might get a donation of a telescope this week. We started talking about how there will be so many amazing moments like this at the hut, that it would be great to document the moments in photos and words with a blog. People working at the huts could be the authors, and visitors to the huts could contribute their photos and stories as comments. This was just another example of how Social Media can be used to build communities, document memories, and promote nature-based tourism.

Vici is very involved with the Kingfield Pops which is an annual summer concert in the beautiful town of Kingfield.  She told me how excited she is about the Pops being involved with the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce and Lorna Nichols, its executive director.  I told her that the Pops could upload video to YouTube and create a Wikipedia listing, as well as populate the web with other content in order to optimize its social media online. Maybe we could record some podcasts with the music and the musicians as well.

All of these examples drive home the fact that it’s wonderful for me to be a part of so many social and professional networks in my day-to-day life, but all of these networks can ‘live’ and be reenforced online too, in Web sites, blogs, Wikis, podcasts and videos. That’s why they call it Social Media, and I find myself talking about it with everyone I know because it’s so exciting for a professional communicator like me.