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Awesome effort to save showshoe races

We were bursting with pride Friday to see so many people in the Saranac Lake community — with major help from Lake Placid — work their tails off to save the World Snowshoe Championships.

They needed saving, and it looks like the local effort has achieved that incredible feat.

The weather, which gave us a winter wonderland a week ago, played a cruel trick on the Saranac Lakers who worked so hard for more than a year to bring this international event here: planning, organizing, promoting, preparing and getting people excited about it.

Last week we had a couple of feet of beautiful snow on the ground, but daytime highs in the 50s, overnight lows above freezing and rain have wiped out all but a crusty, dirty memory of that.

It’s been heartbreaking. Pretty much every single person we’ve talked to all week has brought up how badly they feel for the community — especially the volunteers and village officials who put their hearts and souls into this.

On Friday morning, opening day, it pained us to see the village coated in mud under gray, drizzly skies. Melted snowbanks had revealed cigarette butts, garbage and dog feces. Normally we see this in April, when there are no tourists to see it — much less treasured guests from all over the world.

This isn’t organizers’ fault, nor village workers’. They had been cleaning streets and sidewalks, and were out doing it again Friday, but spring cleaning normally takes a week or two. Besides, they had a whole lot of other stuff to do Friday — such as joining a massive snow-moving operation at Dewey Mountain Recreation Area.

The races were always supposed to largely take place at Dewey, but on Thursday they were moved there entirely, dropping the exciting plan to start the race downtown on hauled-in snow and run the course through the woods to Dewey.

But Dewey wasn’t doable, either — not as is. But with vision, faith, creativity, help from neighbors and an insane amount of work, it was possible to make it doable.

This is where things start looking up. With one phone call from village Manager John Sweeney, truckloads of snow started arriving from Lake Placid, courtesy of the municipalities there and the state Olympic Regional development Authority. Saranac Lake village workers operated heavy machinery to unload, move and spread the snow trucked in from Lake Placid.

Meanwhile, word had gone out that volunteers were needed to shovel snow onto Dewey’s trails, as well as divert flowing streams of snowmelt off of them. About 30 of them showed up and worked hard, under efficient and effective leadership.

Everyone involved seems confident that the trails will be ready to good, albeit fast, racing today.

This is how we do things here in the Adirondacks. We realize other communities do this kind kind of thing, too, but that doesn’t make us any less proud.

By the time of the parade at 4 p.m., the smiles on everyone’s faces were more than enough to lift the gloom. The happiness continued through the opening ceremonies. People here are not letting the weather get them down, despite their battles with it.

It’s inspiring.

NEWS: Massive snow-moving effort helps save races

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