Young skiers kept their focus despite challenging conditions
Most people in their right mind didn’t go skiing last Sunday. An atmospheric river flowing from the tropics flooded the region with moisture. Ski areas were pounded with rain.
Mount Spokane and the Spokane Ski Racing Association (SSRA) hosted the Pacific Northwest Ski Association J3 Junior Olympic qualifier last weekend. For 173 young athletes from Washington, Oregon and North Idaho, the show had to go on, weather be damned.
The United States Ski and Snowboard Association sets age categories for competition. The J3 classification includes 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls. If a bunch of kids could run gates in that wet blanket, at least I could show up to watch. There was a lot at stake for the J3 racers in three events last Saturday through Monday.
The Mount Spokane J3 qualifier was one of two race weekends that determines who is selected to compete at the Junior Olympics in Squaw Valley, Calif., March 22-27. The final J3 qualifier is at Mt. Hood, Ore., in February. Based on combined results from races at Mount Spokane and Mt. Hood, the top 30 kids in the region will make the cut.
I unloaded from chair one at the summit and found myself in a whiteout. The wind, blowing about 30 mph, did nothing to disperse the wet, blinding fog. I side-slipped into the void to find the starting gate. A strip of orange tape disappeared into the soup. Blue dye on the snow helped mark the way.
A crowd of racers and coaches materialized out of the gloom. I tracked down Chuck Holcomb, SSRA’s head coach. He said that compared to the day before, conditions Sunday weren’t bad at all. Warm rain had actually helped consolidate the iced-over slush racers contended with Saturday. Holcomb had the course salted to further improve the surface.
“Salt raises the freezing temperature of water,” Holcomb said. “It melts the top layer of snow and that bonds to the lower layers. It makes for a firmer surface that holds up better and is more consistent through the field. You get a race that’s more fair, because the kids in the back running last still have a chance to win.”
The giant slalom start was moved about a third of the way down Hourglass. There the fog thinned enough for racers to see about two gates ahead. I watched as they burst from the starting gate one after another and disappeared into the void.
To get a different perspective, I picked my way down to the halfway point of the course. I tried to shoot some video, but the kids were only visible for an instant as they streaked out of the fog, only to disappear again. Their speed in the limited visibility was impressive.
Several SSRA J3 racers skied fast enough to place in the top 10 throughout the weekend. On Saturday, in conditions one parent described as the worst he had seen, Elyse Burandt finished third out of 78 competitors in the ladies giant slalom. Michael Ewers finished sixth out of 95 in the men’s giant slalom.
In Sunday’s giant slalom, Burandt finished second and her teammate Taylor Bauernfeind finished sixth. In the men’s race Ewers took fifth and Michael Estrella placed ninth. Monday, conditions improved for the slalom. McKinley Guenzel of SSRA finished seventh for the ladies and Estrella took eighth for the men.
In a few weeks SSRA travels to Mt. Hood to further pursue Junior Olympic glory. Perhaps conditions will be better for that event. But from what I saw on the racecourse Sunday, horrendous weather isn’t likely to interfere with their focus.