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 mountain in 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."

The training camp, south of Canmore, Alta., has been operating since 1989. 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: 

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.