PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — With the help of crews and volunteers making and trucking snow, the trails at the Nordic Heritage Center are in “phenomenally great” shape for next week’s International Biathlon World Cup, according to organizers.
With snow depths in northern and eastern Maine well below half the historical average, the center’s leaders decided on Jan. 21 to start making snow — as they did in 2011 — as a precaution to ensure the trails would be ready for the competition that combines cross country skiing with target shooting.
“We pulled the trigger,” said Jane Towle, a local real estate agent and biathlon volunteer event director. “We needed to make snow.”
Volunteers and crews made some 10,000 yards of snow from water at a nearby pond, piled it on the land of local photographer Paul Cyr and trucked it to the trails to enhance an average snowpack of less than 10 inches in central Aroostook.
Volunteers also cleared the trails of branches and twigs after a few storms and shoveled snow from the woods onto the trails — saving the Nordic Heritage Center thousand of dollars in snowmaking costs, Towle said.
The race trails have since been groomed and “now they’re letting it set until the temperature goes back down again,” Tom Chasse, a past president of the center, long-time ski teacher and ski shop owner, said on Thursday, as the temperature in Presque Isle reached 46 degrees.
Less than a week before the competition begins on Feb. 11, the race trails are looking “phenomenally great,” said Chasse, who has been helping to prepare the trails and whose great-grandfather used to farm the wooded hills that now comprise the Nordic Heritage Center.
And thanks to a dusting of snow Friday, the potato fields that were barely covered at all after a stretch of above-freezing temperatures and rain may not be so bare when European media arrive this weekend or when the athletes arrive Monday. Chasse noted it’s also possible some more significant snowfall may come, as happened with past competitions in winters with less-than-average snow.
“If history has any indication of what we should expect, probably Tuesday or Wednesday we’ll get a 20-inch snowstorm, and then we’ll be out there scraping the snow off the course,” Chasse said.
The competition in Presque Isle, which will run through Feb. 14, will be the eighth and only U.S. stop in a nine-part series of the biathlon, and it’s being made possible because of the more than 500 volunteers and local companies contributing their time, equipment and sponsorship.
They’ve helped set up media booths for the European broadcasters, built by students at Northern Maine Community College; set up a jumbotron; and set cable lines through the trails, among other efforts. Volunteers also are hosting and helping feed some of the 400 athletes and team staff from 32 countries.
The biathlon competition in Presque Isle is expected to draw some 60 million television viewers in Europe, where the sport is about as popular as American football. Towle said it’s also going to have a “huge impact” in The County, from trips for school students coming to watch the competition, to a small stimulus for retailers, eateries and hotels.
The event will probably bring in more than $7 million to Aroostook, she estimated, based on the biathlon competitions that’ve been held at the Nordic Heritage Center and the 10th Mountain Division Lodge in Fort Kent. “Every hotel from Fort Kent to Houlton is full,” Towle said.