RUMFORD — Ask any Mainer what a shovel is for and chances are, if they intend to provide a serious answer, they will say it’s to remove snow.
The opposite was true at Black Mountain early this week, where volunteers worked furiously shoveling snow onto the trail to get it ready so the 2011 U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships could resume on Wednesday.
Sunday’s first day of racing went off without a hitch, but rain and warm temperatures melted so much snow that organizers had to postpone the classical races scheduled for Tuesday until Wednesday.
While temperatures took a nose-dive and the air dried out enough for the Chisholm Ski Club to fire up the snow guns, getting the snow where it was needed was a problem.
“We had some holes in the trail we couldn’t get to with the snow gun, so we had to move the snow to the holes,” Chisholm Ski Club volunteer Craig Zurhorst said.
Zurhorst said Swasey Excavation of Bethel provided a crew to move snow from snow-making piles onto the course with a bucket loader and articulated dump truck. A groomer spread the snow while volunteers from the ski club and a number of competing teams harvested snow from beside the trail with shovels to fill in where snow was needed.
The ingenuity was enough to impress Chisholm mainstay Wendall “Chummy” Broomhall, a two-time Olympic skier who designed the cross country trails for the 1960 Squaw Valley and 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.
“We’ve got an amazing bunch of volunteers,” the 91-year-old Broomhall said. “Even the skiers came out and helped on the course, coaches, everybody pitched in.”
Competitors in the men’s 15K and women’s 10K praised the course’s readiness Wednesday.
“It’s pretty impressive that they even have a course. There was so much shoveling going on (Tuesday),” said Liz Stephen of East Montpelier, Vt., who was the first skier on the course.
“They did a great job with getting the snow on the course,” men’s 15K champion Lars Flora said. “We walked the course yesterday and I was like, ‘Wow.’ They’re going to be up until four in the morning getting snow out there.”
Organizers had to shorten the original distance course into a 2.5K loop for it to be suitable for over 400 competitors Wednesday. Broomhall said the new trail wasn’t as challenging as the one originally planned, but the skiers, including Bates College senior Megan McClelland, said it was a deceptively difficult course.
“The toughest part was starting out flat and downhill and going into a series of hills that weren’t really steep and kind of fooled you,” said McClelland, who finished 78th. “So you were working hard the whole time.”
The remaining schedule calls for two more days of freestyle competition on Thursday and Saturday, split up by a training day on Friday, with snow potentially moving in early in the weekend.
Whether Mother Nature drops more natural snow on the trails or not, volunteers were confident the trails will hold up.
“It wasn’t easy pulling this off,” Broomhall said. “But we’ve got it made now.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
