The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Tight, light and wicked fast
For the second year in a row, Crested Butte Mountain Resort is hosting the Gore-Tex U.S. Ski Mountaineering Championships presented by La Sportiva. The event draws the top men and women ski mountaineer (skimo) racers in the nation to pin it to win it for three days Friday through Sunday, March 13-15.
“This is for all of the marbles,” says Team Griggs Orthopedics athlete and race director Bryan Wickenhauser. “This is where we crown the king and queen of skimo racing.”
The weekend of heart-pumping, lung-busting racing kicks off with the vertical race on Friday night, March 13 at 5 p.m. The course has been tweaked from the one used last year to bring a better experience and an extra level of pain for racers, as they must climb 2,400 vertical feet as fast as they can.
The race starts at the base area, up Warming House Hill and continues up the front before wrapping around into Paradise Bowl, past the base of the North Face Lift, across the top of Paradise Bowl, past the ski patrol building and then up the High Lift line finishing at the top of Eflin’s Way, formerly known as Northstar.
“It’s a lot more and flows a lot better than last year’s course,” says Wickenhauser. “The winners should be doing it somewhere around 33 or 34 minutes.”
Following the crowning ceremony of the national vertical race champions, athletes have the night to rest and recover before lining up Saturday morning for the 8 a.m. start to the individual race.
While in past years the course also included a trip into and out of the Phoenix/Spellbound area, this year, the area is unavailable for the race. As a result, a new course has been designed thanks to the efforts of the Crested Butte Professional Ski Patrol and experienced professional skimo racer Marshall Thomson.
A majority of the course will be the same as in years past, including the “Patrol Ridge,” but the hole left by missing out on Spellbound will be replaced with a tour of Teo 2 as well as a bootpack/jumar up Rambo’s.
“We just needed to come up with a new idea since we’re missing Spellbound,” says ski patroller and race “Director of Stoke” Eric Baumm. “We got our pens together and drew up a map.”
As a result, while the Patrol Ridge is always the highlight, Baumm believes the climb up Rambo will also be a sight to see.
The race ends with the climb up the Patrol Ridge to the summit of Crested Butte Mountain before skiing down off the peak, taking the high traverse into the Banana and then skiing the Banana in its entirety before finishing at the base of the Westwall Lift.
Wickenhauser expects the winners to finish in two hours and thinks, due to course conditions, champions will be decided by who can pull off the smoothest race.
“It’s going to be firm and fast,” says Wickenhauser. “A course like this is prone to errors so it’s going to be tough to run a clean race. It’s going to come down to who can make the least amount of mistakes.”
Once that is done with, individual champions will be crowned and athletes will return to rest and recover mode, as they will line up once more on Sunday at 8 a.m. for the team race. That course will be different from the individual course but still include the Patrol Ridge.
