BRATTLEBORO — When this town’s Harris Hill Ski Jump hosted its first national championship in 1924, the biggest obstacle faced by what the press called “the largest gathering of ski enthusiasts ever assembled in the East” was the mountain of snowfall “making parking within the grounds impossible.”
What a difference a century makes.
Observing the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2022, Vermont’s sole Olympic-size ski jump endured a freak 60-degree thaw just days earlier that forced it to replace evening fireworks with an into-the-night snowmaking show.
Crews hoped to avoid a repeat performance last year by funneling and freezing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water into a thick layer of frosting two weeks in advance on Groundhog Day, only to face another temperature swell and scramble.
That’s why workers fired up their machinery a full month out this winter, working 24/7 throughout the week of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in hopes of outgunning Mother Nature.
“It could change any day, but right now I think we’re good,” Jason Evans, a local contractor in charge of hill preparation, said of the resulting stockpile, which stood taller than the 13½-foot trailer holding the gun’s electric generator.
Evans and crew are bulldozing that snow onto the hill this week before the venue hosts more than two dozen athletes from North America and Europe on Saturday and Sunday.
“We are in much better shape, 100%,” head of competition Todd Einig said. “And it’s going to be plenty cold enough at night to make more.”
When Einig first jumped Harris Hill in 1986, fledgling competitors like himself could practice multiple times a week starting in December. Now coach of the junior training program, Einig couldn’t work with students this winter until snow and cold arrived in January, only to have to cancel many subsequent sessions because of a melting surface more like mashed potatoes.
Fellow volunteer Spencer Knickerbocker empathizes. The director of the nearby Marlboro Nordic Ski Club spent the past weekend repairing bare spots on a cross-country course where Harris Hill jumpers will race in a companion event on Sunday.
Fluctuating weather has kept Knickerbocker, 31, from passing his longtime title as the sole local competitor to the next Spencer — in this case, 13-year-old Spencer Jones of Putney.
Jones, the great-grandson of the late U.S. Sen. George Aiken, recently won entrance to the 2024 Junior Nationals later this month based on jumps on 30-meter and 65-meter slopes. The seventh-grader is slated to try his first test run at the 90-meter Harris Hill this week, although it’s unclear when he’ll compete at the Olympic-size venue.
“Spencer has progressed exponentially in a short time,” Einig said of Jones, “but this winter has not allowed for a lot of training.”
Then again, Harris Hill — the only one of its height in New England and just one of six of its stature in the nation — has a history of rising above. A lack of snow has canceled competition only six times (in 1930, 1932, 1937, 1980, 1981 and 1998), with just one of those years coming after the addition of snowmaking in 1985.
Organizers hauled in snow from outlying areas in 1938 and from local streets in 1954, and went so far as to postpone the event by a month in 2005.
This weekend’s competition was expected to receive some last-minute help from a Tuesday nor’easter, only to see the storm move south and bring only snowmaking temperatures.
“You know the weather around here — the forecast is going to change 62 times,” Einig said. “But right now, it looks good.”
