When the late Dartmouth Outing Club founder Fred Harris built his hometown jump in 1922, he needed only a few boards for a launch pad and two more for his feet to leap off a peak 30 stories high at speeds of up to 60 mph. Mother Nature did the rest.
Nearly a century later, what’s now New England’s only Olympic-size hill has required nearly $600,000 in renovations to meet stricter world specifications — and day upon day of funneling and freezing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to counter the roller-coaster effects of climate change.
The 90-meter ski jump may be one of just six of its height in the nation, but because volunteers manage everything, they maximize their efforts by limiting competition to one weekend each February.
On Groundhog Day, as meteorologists noted the exact midpoint of winter, the maintenance team saw more grassy shadows than snow in advance of this weekend’s competition.
“The weather changes every day,” Jason Evans, a Dummerston contractor in charge of hill preparation, said at the time. “Do we make snow, or do we take the chance and wait?”
The crew decided to start up its equipment, only to have a compressor fuel filter clog at 3 a.m., resulting in frozen water lines that required top-to-bottom thawing with a propane torch.
Days after the crew finally finished came several inches of snow, followed by a day of melting 46-degree temperatures, followed by back-to-back storms Thursday and Sunday.
In just two weeks, too little snow has morphed into too much snow. But with temperatures forecast in the 40s for this weekend’s competition, it all could change again.
Snowmakers point to 2011 when, during a winter of record snow and cold, they faced a freak thaw, rain and power-snapping winds just before that year’s event, forcing them to shovel snow from the sidelines onto the jump, then try to preserve it with a cold-hold covering of granular nitrogen fertilizer.
“Too many,” Evans says.
Precipitation wasn’t a problem in the decades the venue hosted nine national championships from 1924 and the first finals held in the East to 1992 and the U.S. qualifiers for the Winter Games in Albertville, France. But ever since the hill’s nonprofit board upgraded the jump in 2009, the crew has had to shoot water and pressurized air through snowmaking guns in order to hold the annual tournament.
“Natural snow doesn’t hold up as well as manmade snow,” Evans says. “There’s a lot of air in natural snow — if we get a foot and compact that, it’s 2 inches. And natural snow melts a lot quicker. Manmade snow builds a better base.”
Challenges aside, organizers are aiming to smooth the hill with a grooming machine from West Dover’s Mount Snow in time to welcome more than two dozen jumpers and several thousand spectators this weekend.
Athletes from Austria, Slovenia and the United States will include two locals: 24-year-old Brattleboro native Spencer Knickerbocker and 27-year-old Marlboro College student Chris Lamb. The latter set the hill’s distance record (102 meters, or 335 feet) and won the Fred Harris title in 2010 and 2013.
(With a third victory, Lamb would be the sixth person to retire the trophy since the hill’s creation nearly a century ago.)
Harris Hill also will continue its longtime tradition of welcoming female competitors, who were excluded from the Olympics since the first Winter Games in 1924, until finally being included in the most recent gathering in Sochi, Russia, in 2014.
As for the weather?
“We’ll see what it does,” Evans says.
