1/9/17 Course Update
While many areas to the East and West have been receiving plentiful lake effect snow, Marquette County has unfortunately missed much of it. To say that it’s been painful to watch would be an understatement. Interestingly, skiing at various points along the course (Al Quaal, and all of Forestville specifically) is actually very good…it’s the middle and the end that needs more – as is typically the case. For a point-to-point ski marathon course like ours we need all parts to have adequate coverage.
That said, we have put off a full course inspection until later this week. At this time the course crew believes we may need 6 more inches of snowfall in the rugged areas, and in the city of Marquette, to have a point-to-point course that would meet our quality requirements.
The upside here is that we still have 3 full weeks to go before race day and, if you can believe it, we are ahead of last year at this time…and last year’s course ended up pretty great. We won’t tell you what we were doing last year at this time…but I can tell you there wasn’t a lot of sleep happening. There is much to be positive about this year. Mother nature just needs to cooperate with us a little more (think a stiff North wind as opposed to West-Northwest wind). More course updates to come!
-UPHS Noquemanon Race Committee