A couple of days before Christmas the crew gathered coolers, ice packs and boxes and headed over to Stowe to pack up the snow and overnight mail it to 20 meteorologists in cities such as Boston, Harford, Albany, Springfield and New York. It's rumored that there have been some on-air snowball fights between meteorologists and anchors. Operation Snowball was conceived to let skiers know that Vermont has great snowmaking throughout the state, that systems are running at full capacity and more terrain is opening daily. According to Ski Vermont President Parker Riehle, the state's ski areas have "4,000 acres of terrain served by over 600 miles of snowmaking pipes and guns - that's enough capacity to fill Gillette Stadium with over 40 feet of snow in one hour."