Otway Snow

Otway Nordic Ski Club adds more snow-making equipment

Jun 18, 2020 | 2:17 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The earth-moving equipment is on-site at the Otway Nordic Ski facility and, while it’s early to be thinking about snow, that’s exactly what’s one everyone’s minds right now.

The club received snow guns as a legacy of the Paranordic Championships in 2018 and a total of five hydrants for those guns to link into to generate snow. But hundreds of metres of new piping is going into to add to that capability.

“This next phase will give us an additional 12 hydrants,” explains Kevin Pettersen with the Caledonia Nordic Ski Club. “So we’ll have 17 hydrants in total and then we can distribute those three snow guns.”

They received some funding from the Northern Development Initiatives Trust, which has awarded more than half a million dollars to the club over the years for different projects. CEO Joel McKay says there’s a couple of reasons for that.

“One we have an organization that’s been successful with projects in the past and, number two, climate is shifting and it’s not reliable we’ll have snow every year. So snow-making systems are becoming really, really important for these recreation facilities to be reliable for local users as well as what we’re really hoping for is more sporting competitions to come to town.”

And the club is looking at the possibility of another world event, the likes of the Paranordic Championships, in 2024, cross-country and biathlon trial and world biathlon trial as early as this coming winter.

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