Paved trails completed at Otway, grand opening eyed for May

The new paved trails at Otway are completed, but roller skiers will have to wait until next year to use them.

“We were able to complete all of what we had looked to do and even a little bit more than we were planning to do,” said Kevin Pettersen, who has been managing the project for the Caledonia Nordic Ski Club.

“We have about three kilometres of course, of paved roller-ski, roller-biathlon competition course that’s paved, including the biathlon arena, so that includes the shooting ramp, the stadium area, and the penalty loop area.”

Pettersen added they were able to put in a cutoff for what they consider para-roller skiing or sit-skiing, which also functions as a good trail for recreational users.

“We’ve been able to bring in that recreational component of the project which we weren’t expecting to do until a future phase,” he said.

“Now we have ability for a greater diversity of users to use it rather than just for competitions and training so that we can look forward to having recreational roller skiers and actually people take up roller skiing.”

In addition to be able to host competitions, Pettersen this gives athletes a place to practice off of public roads.

“It’s helping to enhance the safety of roller skiing, so if they’re not mixing up with traffic and things like that, that’s certainly a huge benefit to having these trails,” he said.

The trails were finished in the October, but Pettersen said they made the decision to not open the trails as they would have to put in trail markers for safety and directions.

“Because we were so close to the ski season, we thought that it would be best just to let it sleep over the winter, under the snow, and in May to have a grand opening and announcement and everything like that for the trails,” he explained.

“In essence, there’s very little now that’s needed for the trails to be used, but the only thing is is that people don’t know how to use them, they wouldn’t know what direction to ski them if they weren’t familiar with the plan, so because these are trails on which the roller skiers can get up to 70 kilometres per hour on the downhills, we want to make sure people are skiing these and using them in the right direction.”

Pettersen added they’ve been getting a lot of interest and comments from both provincial and national organizations on the trails.

“This will be a game changer for our athletes in Canada to have a facility like this that doesn’t really exist anywhere else in Canada, to have a purpose built roller ski, roller biathlon trail for competition,” he explained.

“The sentiment was that Europeans are so far ahead because they have a lot of facilities like this in Europe, and this enables us as a country to now kind of have a facility that is on par with what they have in Europe.”

Pettersen said they’ve already had requests for teams to come up and use the trails for training, including teams from the Okanagan, Biathlon Canada, Nordic Canada, and the Para teams as well.