The Great Ski Race thrills skiers and fans alike
Moonshine Ink
By Laura Read
Three decades ago, Tahoe Nordic Center founder Skip Reedy hatched an idea: host a point-to-point ski race 30 kilometers (18 miles) along an old ski route between Tahoe City and Truckee. Skiers would love it, he thought: after enjoying a seven-mile uphill to the 7,770-foot Starratt Pass, they’d swoop downhill through a couple of giant switchbacks, then glide through a pleasant pine forest before descending into Truckee, where they’d finish in blazing downhill glory at Hilltop Lodge. There, the amped-up skiers would rouse one heck of a party. That March, the Great Ski Race was born. Reedy was right; people adored it.
Thirty-three years later, generating up to 1,200 skier registrations in a good snow year, the Great Ski Race is now the biggest cross-country ski competition west of the Mississippi. (The Boulder Mountain Tour near Sun Valley runs a close second.) The race not only attracts some of the country’s fastest, craftiest skiers, but also inspires hundreds of normal folk who scoot along in the snow dust of the elite. Now folded into Tahoe City’s annual 10-day Snowfest calendar, the race has become a tradition uniting cross-country skiing lovers into a sometimes frenetic, always thrilling, skinny-ski extravaganza.
“It’s a community event,” says Truckee resident and two-time Olympic cross-country skier Marcus Nash. “It’s not just cross-country skiers doing a race; it’s everybody in the community taking part because it’s such a fun event.”
A Great Ski Race day begins in the still, cold morning hours on the first Sunday in March. In the start zone of Tahoe Cross-Country Ski Area, skiers cluster in waves divided according to recent race finish times. At 9 a.m. sharp, a blank gun shot launches them into action. The course’s terrain serves up clean views of the Sierra Nevada’s spiny crest, but many racers just as eagerly anticipate the visions awaiting them at Starratt Pass, where the “official course cheerleaders,” wearing blazing new costumes each year, cheer and tease the hard-working athletes over the race’s highest point. Just beyond the pass, Soup Station I revives racers with food and drink. Skiers then charge ahead through several screaming S-turns and across richly forested terrain to Soup Station 2 where leader Ray O’Brien and his gang bamboozle them with antics. The race ends at Cottonwood Restaurant in dashing, sometimes dazzling, last ditch efforts to blast down the final hill without spinning out.
Crowding the finish line, hundreds of fans wait to see who will crash there, exhausted, garage-sale-style, in the course’s last meters. All finishers, standing or not, get a handshake from race co-director Doug Read. They then proceed to a bowl of hot chili and a well-deserved beer. Somehow or another, after all that, the dancing begins. “It’s a big production,” Read says. “A lot of people help put it on. I love talking to everyone at the end, congratulating them on finishing the race.”
Back in the 1970s, shortly after the Great Ski Race originated, Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue Team members took over its operation and made it their one and only annual fundraising event – one and only because it requires the devoted efforts of 150 volunteers and more than six months to produce. Proceeds support the Team’s activities, which include training fourth-graders in snow-safety, training themselves on rescue techniques and the particulars of backcountry terrain, and saving the cold, wet lives of lost skiers, snowboarders and snowmobile riders.
During the Great Ski Race party, racers may or may not notice that bustling around them are dozens of Search and Rescue volunteers serving food, selling coveted race merchandise, and directing traffic. Race co-director Dirk Schoonmaker keeps all that work in line. “The event really pulls the team together,” he says. “Many of the volunteers have been racing it and putting it on since the race began.”
Pre-race events this year include a free Great Ski Race waxing clinic at Tahoe Cross-Country on Monday, Feb. 23 at 6 p.m., and a $15 pasta party at Sawtooth Ridge Café in Tahoe City on Saturday, Feb. 28 from 5 to 8 p.m. The pasta party will feature door prizes and wax recommendations called in directly from the course by Schoonmaker and Read, who will be out on snowmobiles making sure grooming and directional signs are prepared just right. The race course will be groomed for preview mid-week before the race. Check the Tahoe Cross-Country website for the exact date (tahoexc.org).
To register or for information, visit thegreatskirace.com. The $45 registration fee includes a five-color T-shirt, refreshments, a hot lunch, live music and dancing at the finish, and a chance to win one of many donated prizes. (Registration fee rises to $65 on race day.) Racers may also register in person at Tahoe Cross-Country on Friday afternoon, Saturday, and early Sunday morning. To volunteer, contact Chris McConnell at mcspeed@gmail.com.