Dear JNSC members and Nordic skiers,

Welcome to another Nordic ski season!  Here’s where you can get your JNSC membership form, by clicking the link above to download the file and then print it out. Please fill out the personal info, particularly your email address, so we can contact you about significant events as they come up. (Of course we don’t share our email list with anyone else.) Don’t sweat that the form says 2008-2009; just cross that out and write in 209-2010 and you’re good to go.

Once again this season as last, the Juneau Nordic Ski Club membership will be separate from an Eaglecrest Nordic Ski Pass.  JNSC is no longer providing a share of our membership fees to Eaglecrest to help subsidize the costs of grooming there, which they will hopefully be covering by selling enough of their passes at the reasonable price of $79 for the season — a great deal for those skiing there than five times during the season.  Kids under 12 will be free on their Nordic trails.  Eaglecrest will sell their passes at the ski area but not at the CBJ office in downtown Juneau. The Eaglecrest grooming crew has been doing a fantastic job of consistently providing fine grooming, so check it out if you haven’t been up there recently.

JNSC will continue to be solely responsible for grooming of the Valley trails and will continue to sponsor various other events and activities.  Our volunteers are incredible in their day-in and day-out dedication to keeping those trails immaculate whenever the snow is on the ground.  Our volunteers also provide grooming during the shoulder seasons and to touch up trails in between Eaglecrest grooming.  We will also remain strongly involved in assisting Eaglecrest in many different ways, ranging from volunteer work parties to extend the trails there and working with Eagecrest staff to improve conditions, to holding races and ski technique workshops at the mountain.

Wherever you ski, whether only in the Valley on our tracks at the campground and lake, just at Eaglecrest, or a combination of both, we urge you to support our all-volunteer club by purchasing a membership this year.  Without the need to support grooming costs at Eaglecrest, we are continuing our low annual membership dues of $25, with $10 for age 17 and under and no charge for 6 and under.  Those fees will buy our grooming equipment gas and oil, cover maintenance and rebuild our equipment replacement fund.  (Past membership dues have just purchased a brand new snowmachine for us use on the Valley trails year, with the old machine being relegated to backup duty.)

We hope to set up soon a way to purchase memberships online, through PayPal or the like.  But for now, please click on this link to our membership form to open, print and mail in your form with a check for $25 per person to JNSC, P.O. Box 21262, Juneau 99802.  Or of course you’re welcome to make a donation of any size to support our efforts.  Please be sure to provide us with your email address, since this is the only practical way we have of contacting our members to let them know of events, changes and opportunities; a phone number is also useful in case your email changes and we need to contact you to find out what your new one is.

Here’s to another fabulous ski season!

Bart Watson