Working at the top of the world

Ski jump gets a remodel

On Saturday, high above the trees at Pine Valley, two men with no apparent fear of heights worked at the top of the 40-meter ski jump to create an easier way for skiers to launch themselves into the air come ski season.

With help from other Cloquet Ski Club volunteers, Ken Ripp and Jon Waugh have been working to redesign the in-run (the path skiers go down on a ski jump) so that the snow will go inside a new boxed-in track with high side walls rather than trying to cover the entire jump with snow each winter. With the new design, the sides of the track will be pretty much set once it's packed with snow and the Ski Club volunteers will just have to make the track down the middle.

"It will be tons less work," said Ripp, one of the club's key organizers and coaches, noting that it used to take several people "hours and hours" of work to cart enough snow up the massive jump to cover the entire in-run. "We'd be a couple nights for two or three hours just hauling snow up in gunny sacks or recycle bins just to get enough snow up there," Ripp said. "It was thankless work."

The Cloquet Ski Club serves children who are too young to participate in high school Nordic skiing, and jumpers who would otherwise have to travel to Coleraine or the Twin Cities to find a place to jump.

The Cloquet Ski Club has been around almost as long as the ski jumps, which - along with the cross-country ski trails - are basically the reason Pine Valley Park exists. In the early 1960s, Cloquet ski coach Joe Nowak convinced Northwest Paper Company to donate 40 acres of land near the Armory to be used as wwa skiing center for his young athletes. The Cloquet Parks Board threw their support behind the project, as did numerous volunteer groups and businesses. They built a chalet, two ski jumps (with metal donated by Duluth Missabe and Iron Range Railroad), two alpine ski lanes and a network of cross-country ski trails.

Ripp and Waugh both have children who jump, so they know the value of the homegrown ski facilities. In fact, it was the Waugh family that introduced the Ripps to jumping long ago when the kids were little. Ken Ripp was already a Nordic skier, but jumping was an unknown. Now Ripp's youngest two, Aidan (a senior) and Charlotte (an eighth-grader), are both members of the United States Junior National Team for Nordic Combined, which combines both ski jumping and Nordic skiing.

They credit their early exposure at Pine Valley as a key factor in their success.

It's shaping up to be a banner year for the club. Forty kids signed up for jumping, and 120 cross-country skiers with a fair number of kids doing both.

"This is a big year so we will need help from parents, high school kids, anyone who wants to come out and going skiing with groups of kids for 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon (2-3:30 p.m.)," said Ripp, adding that the more efficient jump in-runs will help them use volunteer hours more effectively.

The project is one he'd been wanting to do for a long time. He'd seen similar setups at other ski jumping facilities, but it took getting the right group of people together. Club members and supporters worked with Kolodge Construction to make it happen here.

"Steve Kolodge donated time and equipment and helped with the design," Ripp said. "He spent a lot of time out here and has been a huge help."

Ripp actually tracked the time they've spent on the project - more than 100 hours.

Once the track is finished -they just have to glue carpet remnants to the slick metal surface of the jump so kids don't fall down -they will be ready for jumping season. Now all they need is $70,000 to paint the aging but solid jumps and enough snow to land on.

Charlotte Ripp said she's excited about the new contraption

"She was jumping it with no track at times last year," said her dad, "just packed snow."

"It takes a lot of work to get that track setter up the jump," he explained, noting that the track setter weighs over 80 pounds. "To haul it up there, get it powered and get it to go straight - not easy."

But now it will be easier.

"We should have done this last summer," said Ken Ripp.

"We should have done this 10 years ago," replied Waugh.