Skiers at the Canada Winter Games got to test their skills on a recently-built moguls course at Crabbe Mountain northwest of Fredericton during the competition last week — and now anyone can try the course for themselves.
Jordan Cheney, Crabbe Mountain’s general manager, said now that the Games are over, the moguls run will remain open for day-to-day skiing and snowboarding.
“The general public can have some more variety on hill and get to check out what a Canada Games, or a world class mogul course, skis like,” said Cheney.
Moguls are freestyle skiing on a downhill slope covered in bumps of snow. The terrain requires skiers to make swift, technical turns down the course.
Brian Spence, chief of competition with Freestyle Skiing Canada, said the average ski time for the 20-metre course is 21 seconds.
He said the turn score makes up 60 per cent, the time score is 20 per cent and skiers also must do two unique jumps that make up the remainder of the score — with difficulty and execution in mind.
The Canada Games moguls competition took place on Feb. 24 and 25, with Quebec winning gold for the individual and dual competitions and British Columbia taking the top spot for the moguls team mix.
The course that was used for the Games took a lot of work to get ready, said Spence.
He said the area is groomed flat before the bumps are laid out. Then, a winch cat, which is a special type of groomer, will back down the hill pushing little piles of snow into each spot where the mogul is meant to go. The jumps also need to be skied over multiple times after they are created because the machine can only so so much.
The makers of the run also need to manually “chop” below the jumps with pickaxes, said Spence, which is where they will cut up the snow so it is soft for skiers to land on.
Spence said the Crabbe Mountain run is one of the “most consistent pitched courses anywhere,” meaning the five lanes are equal in steepness.
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“With the continuity of pitch that’s here and the exposure and the snowmaking capabilities, this would have to be one of the top courses in Canada for sure,” said Spence.
Cheney said Crabbe Mountain is “proud to hold that crown” with their moguls course. He said the moguls are currently a little hard since the competition last week, but once the sun comes out, he said everything will soften up and make the course more “user-friendly.”
“I think we’re kind of Canada’s best kept secret as a province and then as a ski hill too,” said Cheney. “We’re a small, mighty, proud community-run ski area.”
Alpine skiing events at Crabbe Mountain started Tuesday and continued until Thursday at the hill.
With files from Mike Heenan
This story was originally published in CBC News on March 2, 2023.
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