[Image: The opening ceremony of the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics; photographer unknown].
A comment from Alexander Trevi on a recent post pointed our attention to the final paragraph of an article by the Associated Press: “According to the International Olympic Committee,” we read there as part of an overall discussion of the forthcoming Vancouver Olympics and that city’s unseasonal condition of snowlessness, “the 1964 Innsbruck Games also faced a lack of snow. The Austrian army rushed to the rescue,” however, “carving out 20,000 blocks of ice from the mountainside and transporting it to the luge and bobsled tracks. They also carried 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the Alpine ski slopes.”
This landscape-on-the-move arrived just in time to format the local terrain for winter sports purposes, temporarily repurposing an assembly line of athletic tracks and military equipment in the process.
As a Seattlite, I'm utterly baffled that they didn't consider this before. It almost never snows here, and is rarely below freezing. I belive the weather in Vancouver is similar.
Cypress and the other North Shore mountains in Vancouver get snow because they have a high enough elevation for it. Most years, things are good. This year, not so much. It's too bad that these events weren't moved to Whistler or even interior BC ski hills where there's plenty of the white stuff.
oh, there's still plenty of "repurposed" military, snow or no…