Sun Peaks Resort in British Columbia are building a permanent ski and snowboard cross course this summer ready for the coming winter.
The resort is working with local business Powder Ventures Excavating Ltd to construct the course on their Sundance Mountain with a team comprised of Sun Peaks Resort and Powder Ventures employees and contractors working on the course.
“Our organizing committee is ecstatic about this announcement,” says Nancy Greene Raine, Canada’s Female Athlete of the 20th Century and Sun Peaks resident. “We’ll have less worries about the weather cooperating (to build the course with man-made snow) and our event participants will have a new course for this year’s event in January. This means so much for the community and athlete development in Sun Peaks and in the province.”
Course construction will be made possible by a three-year partnership and course title sponsorship agreement with Powder Ventures Excavations, who will be contributing significant machine and manpower resources to the project build. The Powder Ventures Ski and Snowboard Cross Course will be one of few cross courses in Canada built of dirt. Most are built out of snow each winter season, as has been the case in Sun Peaks since 2019. This project, valued at $100,000, has plenty of long-term benefits.
“A permanent course will significantly reduce our reliance on early season snow, snow making resources, and snow cat operating time, and allow us to open the course earlier in the season,” says Aaron Macdonald, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer for Sun Peaks Resort. “Finding a local company to partner with was the best-case scenario and we’re proud to be working with Jason White and his team at Powder Ventures Excavations on this exciting project for the resort.”
Course construction began on July 15 and is anticipated to take two to three weeks. Powder Ventures Excavations will be hauling in upwards of 1000 cubic metres of dirt for the project, from an existing construction site in Sun Peaks. A heavy-duty D8 bulldozer will be part of the construction fleet, joining a project crew made up of Sun Peaks Resort employees, Power Ventures machine operators, and contractor Jeff Ihaksi, who has once designed and built Olympic ski and snowboard cross course venues across the globe. Ihaksi will be part of the construction team, moving and shaping dirt.
Powder Ventures Excavations owner Jason White and his family are long-time locals of the Sun Peaks area. Their family has close ties to freestyle skiing, with Jason’s son Ryder, 16, the current Junior National Champion in Slopestyle and Jason an active board member with Sun Peaks Freestyle Club.
“Going into our 25th Anniversary year of operating Powder Ventures, I couldn’t think of a better way to mark this milestone than by supporting this project as the course title sponsor,” says White. “We’re excited to have a pivotal role in building a course that will open up so many opportunities for local athletes and the community as a whole.”
The Powder Ventures Ski and Snowboard Cross Course will provide local alpine and freestyle athletes with a reliable and high calibre training facility for their development in the ski and boarder cross discipline, part of freestyle skiing in the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS). Sun Peaks Resort can begin bidding to host high level competitions, such as national, NorAm and World Cup events. A component of this project also includes a refinement of some existing features in the Terrain Park, to bring them up to a higher competition level.
Ashleigh McIvor, Canadian freestyle skier and 2010 Olympic Champion in the first ever ski cross at the Olympics commented, “Setting the standard with this level of investment in course builds will be an important contribution for the momentum of the sport’s evolution. A permanent course that is ready to go as soon as the snow flies and can be enjoyed by the whole family, lap after lap, all season long, is key in getting children interested in freestyle skiing and ski cross by exposing them to the sport early, in an unhurried, low-pressure environment. European resorts have been making this transition to permanent courses and it’s drawing a lot of interest from elite racers and thrill-seekers to grandparents alike!”
A grand opening event will be planned in the winter when the course is ready for the public.
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