Road closures and frigid temperatures have forced the postponement of Wednesday’s opening race at the 2010 West Yellowstone Ski Festival.
The shutdown of Highway 20 has stranded timing equipment in Idaho, causing the race jury to push back the double sprint qualifier by 24 hours. Temperatures on Thanksgiving day are predicted to be milder, with highs above the legal racing limit, and an employee of the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office said that the highway was likely to be clear by then.
“If it goes the way they reported it’s going to go, and we’re just cold with no wind tomorrow, yeah—they’ll have it open,” said the employee, a dispatcher who would only give her name as Deb. “We’ve got some big drifts out there.”
Earlier today, festival officials had delayed the start of Wednesday’s race by two hours, to 11 a.m., and they had hoped to avoid a postponement to Thanksgiving, when many volunteers are planning to spend time with their families.
Wednesday’s forecast had called for high temperatures below the legal racing limit of negative four. But even if it had been warm enough, both timing equipment and a warming hut are still stuck 100 miles southwest of West Yellowstone, in Idaho Falls. That gave the race jury little choice but to push back the competitions, according to Technical Delegate Al Pokorny.
“If we had everything here, I think tomorrow’s race would probably be okay weather-wise,” Pokorny said. “The real problem is all the roads are closed.”