Lack of snow shuts down Haig Glacier training in Alberta for the first time in program history

Reliable access to summer snow, groomed trails, simple alpine huts to rest your head after a long slosh on skis all perched atop a mountainin Alberta's Peter Lougheed Provincial Park near Haig Glacier.

The Beckie Scott High-Performance Training Centre has given athletes an edge for decades. A chance for bonding, conditioning in high altitudes and off-season practice,but not this year.

"Before we even got to the camp, I said,'wow we're in trouble here, this is crazy,'" said Winsport's Mike Norton.

"I mean, the glacier itself is still white and there's still a bit of snow but that time of year we're melting 10 centimetres a day. We would have exposed blue ice before we even planned to open."

Thetraining camp, south of Canmore, Alta., has been operating since1989. It has seen impacts from COVID restrictions, and seasons cut short when the late-summer heat melts snow away, but it has never before cancelled the entire camp because of a poor snowpack.

WATCH| CBC visited the training facility more than 30 years ago:

In August 1990, CBC hiked into the Haig Glacier

1 year ago

Duration 3:55

The Beckie Scott High-Performance Training Centre is a training camp found on Haig Glacier.

Norton, who is the senior manager of Canmore Operations, made the call in June that the camps at Haig couldn't go forward.

Last year, he said the snowpack was massive, 640 centimetres on the glacier, the second highest Norton could find on record. This year, the opposite, one of the lowest snowpacks recorded in around 40 years.

When his crews arrived and measured in June, they could feel the glacier below with their depth instruments just 140 centimetres of snow.

"It was just an unprecedented low snowpack that we've never ever seen before," he said. "Unfortunately we had to make the call that it's just not viable to open with what we were faced with."

The crew saw this coming.

The Bow Valley didn't get much snow through the winter, and much of what fell quickly melted in various parts of the Southern Alberta Rockies weeks ahead of schedule.

But it didn't make this news easier for athletes.

The camp welcomes biathlon and cross-country athletes from Alberta, British Columbia and sometimes Americans make the trek.

It accommodates 25 athletes and their coaches, one week at a time, for the entire summer. This season, Norton said they had nine groups confirmed.

The training block for some of those elite athletes is critical, and intense.

"It's built into an annual plan," Norton said. "You know that would typically be a week 20 plus hours of training. It's a lot of time. So now they have to fill that somewhere else."

Those high performance athletes, Norton added, make up about 40 per cent of the facility bookings. The rest are younger kids who head up the mountain once their summer break hits.

And this opportunity is a highlight.

"It's really depressing, to be honest with you," said Katie McMahon, cross-country ski coach at the Foothills Nordic Ski Club.

"When I told my athletes, obviously they were very bummed out and I kind of said OK, we're going to have a couple days to be sad about this," McMahon said. "They worry about the same things that I do."

McMahon said they have seen so many things cancelled in the last few years; with COVID, forest fires, and a changing climate.

So, this news was tough, but McMahon said her athletes are resilient, and keen to the fact that this is a training opportunity others across the country just can't access.

"There's nothing that's going to compare to going up to the Haig, unfortunately, it's not something we can just pull out of our back pockets," McMahon said. "I can't just make snow happen."

Higher-level athletes, she said, can travel to the snow. But for her group this summer training strategy will include a lot more hikes and roller skiing.

The down-time means Norton's crews were able to make some improvements up on the Haig site. New solar, new windows lots of much-needed maintenance.

"I guess with every tragedy, there's an opportunity," he said. "We got a lot of work done. So it sets us up very nicely for next year."

He's confident the snow will fall, and operations can resume for summer 2024. The glacier, he said, is still very intact,despite receding.

But he does have concerns with the future operations at Haig.

"What I'm concerned with personally is the average daily high temperatures, Norton said. "Those heat domes that we saw a couple of years ago, those had a significant impact on the operation."