Ski to the Clouds from the Sidelines

Today was Ski to the Clouds, hosted up at Great Glen Trails. The course for this 10k race was 4k on the Great Glen trail system and then up the Mt. Washington Auto Road for the rest of the race. Now, for those of you who don't know, the Auto Road is literally all uphill. Yikes. This is a serious race. Needless to say, I was happy to offer my services as a volunteer (well, Snowman really volunteered me, but I had planned to come up anyway) and watch from the sidelines! I just haven't been skiing strongly enough this season to think I could do the race with any sort of ease.

Now that you know what the race was like, let's just add to the difficulty... It poured like crazy all afternoon and evening on Saturday and then at some point in the night got cold enough that things froze solid. Then in the early hours of Sunday morning, it started to snow. And with the snow came the wind. The flags on the lodge deck were flapping like crazy and the newly fallen snow was swirling in the air. Tough conditions. But the groomers did awesome, going over the course multiple times and tilling and grooming the course up as best they could. And the racers were in good spirits, looking forward to this adventure.

I was manning an intersection along the Great Glen trail section, where the skiers came down a hill and took a sharp turn. The lead pack went through quickly, and the rest of the field followed, with many people waving and smiling as they made the corner. It was fun to cheer everyone on!

Once the final skier had gone by, I took a quick spin around the trail system. Actually, with the new snow in the tracks, the skiing was pretty good, albeit with a very hard surface underneath.

Back in the race, 2006 Olympian Justin Freeman took the lead going up the Auto Road and won by over 2 minutes. Wow! Awesome job to all the racers, and to the staff at Great Glen Trails. Everyone I talked to after the race had good things to say about their experience. I mean, how many people can say they've skied up (oh yes, and down--after they'd finished their race) the Auto Road?!

On an unrelated note, I had three bald eagle sightings today. Two eagles were floating high on the air waves over Rt. 196 in Lisbon Falls; the third was sitting in a tree along the Androscoggin along the bike path as I drove by on my way to the grocery store this evening. Cool!