LIGHTS FOR ROCHESTER
A "Most Liveable City" has become more liveable for skiers By Greg Marr A few years ago, Michael O'Connor and some friends wanted to do something to improved ski conditions in Rochester, Minn.
After all, here was a city one of the state's largest with over 80,000 residents that can boast of being named by Money magazine as both the
Most Livable City in America and the Best Small City in America; home to the Mayo Medical Center (where Ph.D. O'Connor is a professor of radiologic physics) and the largest IBM complex under one roof; yet the skiing was woefully inadequate. And as readers of this magazine would surely tell Money magazine, how can a city be "Most Livable" without adequate skiing?
Granted, Rochester about 50 miles west of Winona in southeastern
Minnesota doesn't get the snow of, say, Duluth, but it is, as O'Connor points out, colder than Duluth. He's right; I looked it up. The average January low in Duluth is 2.2F. Rochester, over 200 miles south of Duluth? Minus 4.7F. When they get snow in Rochester, they treasure it; they cherish it; they smooth it, pack it, break it up when it freezes and keep skiing on it. The problem is that there are just not a lot of places to ski.
Duluth's Web site claims 44K or so of ski trails. Rochester, nearly identical in population, has far less. There's Chester Woods, about five miles from the city with about 8K of groomed trails; Eastwood Golf Course, which had until recently 5.1K; and then a few other areas where, O'Connor points out, grooming was "sporadic at best." Such was the state of affairs when O'Connor and friends formed the Rochester Active Sports Club a few years ago.
"We wanted to improve ski conditions," O'Connor said last fall with his pleasant Irish accent, "and we knew that we would be more effective approaching the parks and rec department as a group than as individuals, so we formed a club. Even if there were only five or six of us, which there were at the beginning, it would look better as a club," he adds with a chuckle. Today the Rochester Active Sports Club (RASC) has blossomed to some 180 members.
In a relatively short period, the future of cross country skiing in Rochester became, literally and figuratively, much brighter. On April 5, 2000, club directors opened discussions with Roy Sutherland, of the Rochester Park and Recreation Department, on the development of a lighted ski trail system in the area. This winter, the lights will go on over a newly developed section of trail at Eastwood, a three plus kilometer segment,
bringing the total at Eastwood to between eight and nine kilometers.
"We really had nothing at all," O'Connor emphasized. "People don't think about skiing in Rochester. Even though it's often colder than Duluth, we don't get as much snow. Most years, what we have is hard packed and light."
To get anyone but the diehard skiers enthused about skiing, RASC realized things had to change. Expanding the skiing opportunities,
improving grooming and getting a lighted trail were the key focus of the newly formed club.
"People have to get out in winter, and we needed something like this," added O'Connor, referring to the changes at Eastwood.
O'Connor says work on the new lighted trail "is progressing well. The trail is cleared, widened and graded. Electrical people are digging trench for cables for the lights."
Despite a number of significant hurdles placed before the club and the
city, the trail will be ready for this upcoming season. RASC had to endure some tense moments as a $50,000 project grant from the DNR dodged budget cuts on the way to the parks and rec department. Yet even before the grant came in, there were a number of issues to be resolved. First was location.
Officials offered Hawthorne Hills Park with 200 acres available for skiing. The problem with Hawthorne, RASC pointed out, is that all the
terrain is south facing, which is bad for a snow challenged region that struggles to hold snow.
Also considered was the Eastwood Golf Course itself, where skiing was already established. The problem with that plan was shallow soil depth, which would mean digging through rock to install the cables for lights, and having to avoid numerous irrigation systems.
That left a wooded area north of Eastwood, which already has a large
number of trails and significantly is north facing to avoid the damage of winter sun.
"That originally had a classical ski trail and more recently was used for mountain biking," O'Connor said. "The solution to our problem was to lay out the new lighted trail in this wooded area, with a lighted link up to the main clubhouse. Hence, apart from a narrow lighted strip that runs through a wooded part of the golf course, the rest of the new lighted trail
is in woods north of the golf course. The trail in the woods has been widened to about 10 feet to accommodate the grooming equipment and modified to eliminate some difficult downhills. This trail also connects to the existing ski trail in Eastwood, giving us an eight to nine kilometer loop."
"The golf course is located on a north facing hill with about a 100 foot drop from the south to the north," O'Connor added. "This north facing
slope means that it retains snow better than any other ski trail in Rochester. In fact, we often can have a completely brown landscape around us except for Eastwood, which will still be white."
Eastwood's original trail was designed by skiers who worked closely with the groomer to pick a route with the best snow retention and avoid running over the greens.
"The trail on the golf course," O'Connor pointed out, "contains some
good hills, although none of the descents are technical. We do a lot of time trials and small, local races on it. It's about about 5.5 kilometers.
"The new trail is a lot more challenging than the trail on the golf course, with a lot more twists, turns and small, sharp climbs, although it also has two long, flat sections that we plan to use for coaching and ski classes. We will probably make it a one way system for safety reasons."
RASC looked a several different lighting systems that would be acceptable to nonskiing Eastwood users in the summer. RASC and city officials eventually agreed on a removable lighting system.
"We have a company doing airport type lights," O'Connor said. "They're small, modified lights on about 100 removable poles three feet off the ground. With this type of system, the poles are only in place over the winter and are removed every spring. There is a sealing cap that covers
the base plate when the pole is not in use. With this system, there should be no complaints from golfers, as there are no visible signs of a lighting system when the poles are removed. It also reduces the risk of vandalism when the trail has other uses."
In addition to helping lay out the new trails, in return for having the city develop the trail, RASC has agreed to pay for the lighting costs during the ski season, and to install and remove the poles at the beginning and
end of the ski season.
With the new trail project rolling along, RASC turned its attention to improving grooming. The Rochester park and rec department grooms Eastwood "about three times a week," according to O'Connor. "They have a snowmobile with a Tidd Tek groomer. However, one of the problems we have had over the years is a hard packed, icy trail. Last year, the club raised $1,200 to purchase two grooming units from
Brother Jerome Rademacher in St. Mary's College in Winona (see Silent Sports , February 2002). These units are designed to break up a hard packed, icy surface. One unit was donated to the Rochester Park and Recreation Department and the second to the staff at Chester Woods, which is a county park that has some very nice trails about eight miles from town."
With the goals of "expanding the skiing opportunities, improving
grooming and getting a lighted trail" taken care of in relatively short order, RASC is turning its attention to other ski related projects. With the improved conditions and lighted trail for evening skiing, RASC has started a high school ski program, and is currently looking for funds to buy skis for kids. With partial funding from AXCS the national organization in the United States for Masters skiers RASC, which is a member of AXCS, recently purchased 12 pairs of skis, bindings and
poles. The skis will be used to support high school skiers and club members who are interested in trying out cross country skiing this winter.
Dovetailing with that and the trail improvements is yet another project: a clubhouse.
"That's our next project," said O'Connor. "We've been begging space in the golf clubhouse. We need our own clubhouse."
For an organization in just its third year, RASC has had a remarkable
impact on skiing in the Rochester area. While adding a few kilometers of new trail and lighting won't quite make Rochester a skiing Mecca, it certainly makes skiing in the area a much more attractive alternative for everyone from the elite to the couch potato. This "Most Livable City in America" has become much more livable.
RASC IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST SKIING
From its Web site (www.rasc mn.org), we learn that the Rochester
Active Sports Club is "a multi sport club designed to provide a framework for the support and development of sports such as cycling (mountain bike and road) and nordic skiing in southeast Minnesota." Club members are involved in roller skiing, inline skating, triathlons and duathlons, racing and touring.
It is a nonprofit club with a charter that allows the members to form additional groups to support activities like in line skating, etc.
"Most of the business of the club is conducted via e mail and the Internet," the Web site reports, "as they provide rapid, inexpensive means of communication.
"RASC is strongly orientated toward active participation in endurance sports. Most of us would rather be out biking or skiing than in a meeting. With its strong emphasis toward endurance sports, many of the members actively compete in their sports. One of our primary goals is to build up
active participation through coaching sessions and clinics to improve members' skills in biking and skiing. We organize coaching sessions, ski events, bike races and regular bike rides. The coordinators were picked because they are very active in their sports and had been informally organizing many such events over the last few years."
RASC currently has a board of directors for each of the main groups in the club. Feel free to contact any of the following for more information:
Nordic Skiing: Michael O'Connor (mkoconnor@mayo.edu), Alan Schmidt (alan.schmidt@usbank.com) and Henry Walker (walk2@mayo.edu)
Mountain Biking: Kathy Becher (kathy1742@aol.com), Gary Gross (ggross@mayo.edu) and Alan Schmidt (alan.schmidt@usbank.com)
Bike Touring: Sandra Beck (sandra.beck@pca.state.mn.us)
Randonneur Events: Martin Fahje (fahje@mayo.edu)
Bike Racing: Mark Consugar (consugar.mark@mayo.edu), Michael O'Connor (mkoconnor@mayo.edu), Rod Sandberg (sandberg.rodney@juno.com) and Charlie Tri (charlytri@netscape.net)
Triathlons: Dawn Johnson (johnson.dawn@mayo.edu)
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