Tony Clark, the founder of Blueberry Hill Ski Touring Center and one of the founders of the 1970s nordic ski boom in Vermont, has died, in Goshen, VT, where he made it happen. That’s Tony, above, in April of 1973. Not the best or sharpest photo ever made of him, but one that captures something of the times and a bit of Tony’s spirit. I […]
Category Archives: cross-country skiing
Farewell, Tony Clark
Also posted in Blueberry Hill Inn VT, Goshen VT, Tony Clark, Vermont
Tagged Blueberry Hill Inn, Tony Clark
January in November
November turned to winter in a hurry: snow, skiing and temperatures one night near zero. Both photos, early season skiers at Craftsbury Outdoor Center, VT, USA.
Also posted in Craftsbury Outdoor Center, Vermont, Winter
Tagged Craftsbury Outdoor Center, cross-country skiing, Vermont, Vermont winter
Winter Jumps
After a long cloudy day, the sun came out and the kids started jumping off the mini-mountain of manmade snow at the Craftsbury, VT, Outdoor Center last weekend. The guy on the bottom started out facing the other direction and in this series is en route to a 360.
Also posted in Craftsbury Outdoor Center, Vermont, Winter
Tagged Craftsbury Outdoor Center, cross-country skiing, Vermont, winter
Craftsbury Half Marathon
The Craftsbury, VT, Outdoor Center held its first half marathon Saturday on a beautiful and challenging course that traversed 13.1 miles of dirt roads, ski trails, and single-track through the woods to the Hill Farmstead Brewery in Greensboro. 2,000 feet of elevation gain with beer and lunch at the end. Adam Martin, a nordic skier with the Craftsbury Green Racing Project (above, center) won in […]
Also posted in dirt roads, marathon, running, Vermont
Tagged dirt roads, running, Vermont
It’s Still Winter in Quebec
No matter what it’s doing where you are, it’s still winter at Mont Sainte Anne in Quebec, just down the Fleuve St. Laurent from Quebec City. Four feet of snow on the ground in the last week of February. Velo d’hiver riders (below) and skiers taking advantage of the situation while they can. Hydro Quebec electric lines humming loudly in the falling snow. For more, […]
Meanwhile, in Lapland
Well, actually it was back in early March, after the Lahti World Nordic Ski Championships. We ski toured in Lapland, northern Finland, in the Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park. Basically inn-to-inn skiing, complete with northern lights and daily saunas. The park is laced with hundreds of kilometers of trails groomed for classic and skate skiing, weaving through the low, rounded Lapland mountains called tunturi. We went on […]
SuperTour @ Craftsbury
Top nordic skiers from around the country raced in the USSA SuperTour on Friday and Sunday at the Craftsbury, VT, Outdoor Center, which has become one of the nation’s top nordic sites over the past few years. Conditions were superb, grooming world class and the competition serious. Top, New Hampshire’s Kris Freeman leads the pack in falling snow in the 30-k classic race Friday. Freeman wears […]
Also posted in cross country ski racing, Vermont
Olympic Concerns
They don’t look worried, but Vermont Olympic nordic skiers (l to r) Ida Sargent and Liz Stephen (both cross-country), and Hannah Dreissigacker and Susan Dunklee (both biathlon) held a press conference today to express their concerns about how global climate change is affecting the world and their sport. Just back from six months of competition in Europe, including the Sochi Olympics, they told of lack of […]
Austria & the World Masters
In late January I was in the Austrian Alps for the World Masters Cross-Country Ski Championships in the Pillerseetal region, near Kitzbuhel. The landscape is spectacular and so were a lot of the masters skiers. A masters skier is anyone over 30, and the five-year age brackets continued right up to and including the 85-90 age group. In total more than 1,000 skiers from 30 […]
La Coupe du Monde, Quebec
Nordic skiing World Cup races are rarely held outside of Europe’s skiing nations, where almost every winter weekend they are watched by the kind crowds North America can only manage to turn out for events like professional football. But last weekend the World Cup sprints came to an 800-meter hairpin-turn course of manmade snow in front of the provincial parliament building in Quebec City. Americans […]
