Stratton Mountain Resort Festivities

HOMESICK, a three-day celebration of snowboarding culture and community, takes place at Stratton Mountain Resort in Stratton, Vermont, March 20 through 22, 2026, at a venue that carries singular historical significance for the sport it celebrates. Stratton Mountain is where Jake Burton Carpenter built his earliest snowboard business in the late 1970s, where the first national snowboarding championship was held in 1985, and where the Alpine Snowboard World Cup made its American debut. The resort’s position in snowboarding’s origin story is not incidental to HOMESICK’s premise but central to it: the event is a homecoming in the specific sense that the sport’s creative and competitive lineage runs directly through these Green Mountain slopes.

What the Weekend Covers

The on-snow programme features current professionals, emerging riders, and snowboarding legends sharing the Stratton terrain in a format that prioritises demonstration and interaction over competition formality. The Vintage Board Room provides a curated display of equipment from snowboarding’s developmental decades, showing the material evolution of the sport from its earliest wooden shapes through the fibreglass-and-steel technology that defined the professional circuit’s formative years. The Dawning Exhibit traces the sport’s founding moments at Stratton specifically, providing historical context that visitors with no prior knowledge of the sport’s development find genuinely revelatory. Demo snowboards are available for on-snow testing, and signings by the East Street Archives authors document the book and archival project preserving snowboarding’s early period in text and image.

If You’re Going With Kids: The Vintage Board Room and Dawning Exhibit are the weekend’s most accessible programming for children who do not yet ride: the equipment display shows them that snowboarding began on improvised wooden planks not dissimilar from what they might build in a garage, which tends to demystify the sport’s technical intimidation in a way that watching expert riding alone cannot. Stratton’s beginner terrain and ski school infrastructure remain fully operational through the HOMESICK weekend, making the event a practical combination of cultural programming and first-time riding lessons for families with non-riding members.

The Green Mountains and the Stratton Setting

Stratton Mountain Resort sits in Windham County in the southern Green Mountains at 3,940 feet elevation, approximately 40 kilometres north of Brattleboro via Vermont Route 30. The surrounding Green Mountain National Forest covers more than 400,000 acres of managed forest land with cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and backcountry travel access from multiple trailheads within the Stratton area. The village of Manchester, Vermont, approximately 25 kilometres to the west on Route 11, provides the most concentrated independent shopping and dining infrastructure in the region, anchored by the Orvis flagship store and a collection of factory outlet stores housed in restored historic buildings. For riders and families building a full HOMESICK weekend stay in Vermont’s ski country, Lake.com lists the New Stratton Ski Haus A-Frame with Hot Tub, Sauna, and EV Charging near Manchester and Okemo, an A-frame property with the après-ski infrastructure that a late-March snowboard event at Stratton genuinely calls for at the end of each on-snow day.