Northeast snow buoys ski lodges, snowmobilers

HARTFORD, Conn. – A weekend storm that dumped a foot or more of snow in parts of the Northeast made ski area operators and snow removal workers happy, but travelers were forced to deal with slippery roads and flight cancellations Sunday.

Molly Taaffe, 23, was on the slopes at Loon Mountain in Lincoln, N.H., by 8 a.m. for her 10th day of skiing this season. She said it was her best outing yet.

“There’s nothing like powder,” she said. “It’s incredible. It’s really busy, everyone’s so excited. You don’t get a lot of days like this on the East Coast, so when you do everyone’s psyched.”

Snowfall in the region ranged from 2 to 8 inches in Connecticut and Rhode Island to almost 11 inches in northern Massachusetts and nearly 17 inches on Maine’s southern coast, according to the National Weather Service.

“We term it a kind of low-end nor’easter,” said Bill Simpson, a meteorologist for the Weather Service. “It’s a pretty typical winter storm.”

Some Christmas shoppers saw the storm as an opportunity to avoid crowds Sunday morning.

“It is slippery and no one is out,” said Bruce Long, of Boston, who was shopping in Newton, Mass., just west of Boston “They’re warning people that if you have to get out, do it now because later it’s going to get cold. This is all going to turn to ice and it will be a mess.”

Car accidents were reported across the region, including a crash in central Pennsylvania that killed two people late Saturday morning. Police told the Altoona Mirror that an SUV was traveling too fast for weather conditions when it lost control and slid into the path of an oncoming pickup truck. The two people in the SUV died, and the truck driver was seriously injured.

Airports were working to get back to normal after hundreds of flight cancellations. Many Sunday morning flights at Logan International Airport in Boston and other airports in the region were canceled, but most afternoon flights were listed as on time.

“There weren’t any lines, and passenger flow in the terminals was light to moderate,” said Miraj Berry, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan. “We are open, but it’s very important that passengers check with their airlines before coming to the airport.”