Uncategorized

The original idea of NENSA was to build towards a dream. One time, there’d been a guy from Vermont who won an Olympic medal named Bill Koch. Point a bunch of skiers in the same direction, and maybe there’d be another guy from Vermont who’d do the same thing. Organize the races here, and New England skiers could go anywhere. The map to a world beyond, from within the sport of nordic skiing, started, and remains, at series of races which brings us all together: the Fischer Eastern Cup.

Smack dab during the heart of last winter, that original dream was realized. Ben Ogden, who isn’t prouder of any other accolade than being a “guy from Vermont” won an Olympic medal again. From here, he’d gone there. And then…he did it twice.

As things have mellowed from last winter’s hustle, and New England’s started to bloom once again, the flicker of something new is on the horizon again. As skiers from across the East get back to the woodshed, stacking the days, weeks, and hours that’ll lead to new dreams, there’s a renewed sense of possibility in the air. Word’s gotten out about what’s special about skiing among these ancient highlands, and low endless coasts called New England. The smiles, the drive, the kindness, and the camaraderie of what happens when the snow starts to stick around these parts is a whole made greater than the sum of its parts. In short, it’s a community, made possible by the bit of everything we do that belongs to me and you.

NENSA is proud to carry the fire forward from the woodshed for the New England ski community, by introducing the 2026-27 Fischer Eastern Cup. With a dream of our community realized, we can’t wait to start dreaming anew with you all – skiers, organizers, coaches, volunteers, and more – whether you’re from here or coming through from across the country for a SuperTour, or an education on the EISA circuit. We’ll see you in Holderness come December, and wherever the connections from the Eastern Cup that carry forth throughout the year see us together in the meantime.

The Full 2026-27 Fischer Eastern Cup Schedule:

• Eastern Cup #1: Cheri Walsh Memorial at Holderness School – Holderness, NH
• Eastern Cup #2: Quarry Road Trails – Waterville, ME
• Eastern Cup #3: Lake Placid Eastern Cup and US SuperTour – Lake Placid, NY
• Eastern Cup#4: Oak Hill Eastern Cup and Dartmouth Carnival – Hanover, NH

NENSA is thrilled to share that Caitlin Patterson has joined our Board of Directors. Caitlin brings a wide range of experience to NENSA and we look forward to working with her.

Caitlin lives in Portland, ME where she works as a structural engineer for Thornton Tomasetti. Caitlin also coaches skiing with Nonstop Nordic in the Portland area, leading the Adult training program and helping with the junior program during the summer. She really enjoys sharing her ski expertise and passion for the sport with the local Maine community through Nonstop Nordic, and now with the whole New England community as a board member of NENSA.

Caitlin is a 2-time Olympian, an 11x US National Champion in cross-country skiing, a 2x US National Champion in skimo, and a 2x Xterra Trail Marathon World Champion.

She grew up in Idaho and Alaska, raced NCAA Division 1 during college at the University of Vermont, and spent 10 years racing for the Craftsbury Green Racing Project elite team in northern Vermont. She was a member of the 2018 and 2022 US Olympic teams, as well as the 2017 US Mountain Running World Championship team.

Beyond cross-country skiing, Caitlin loves backcountry skiing, climbing, all types of biking and generally just being outside with friends. She does occasionally chill and enjoys live music, baking, learning about architecture and engineering, and reading books too.

Please join us in welcoming Caitlin!

At a recent NENSA Staff Retreat, it snowed all day and the idea to, paraphrasing, “try and download Adam Terko’s brain” was thrown out more than a handful of times.

Such are the strange perambulations of spring mending-time for New England skiing.

One of the small treats of April is that Adam gets some of the MNC blogs he’s been dreaming up all winter out into the world. Which, this week, came with a touch of sadness and the sweet sentiments of remembrance for Mansfield Nordic Club’s founder, Murray Banks.

You can read Adam Terko’s “‘Tighten Your Boots’ a Murray Banks remembrance” here.

Murray was a familiar figure to this New England skiing community for many years prior to moving to Crested Butte, Colorado in 2015. In late February, the word came down from the mountains that he’d passed on after a long and courageous battle with cancer. He was a rare person where continuing to hustle through the thickest, busiest part of a ski season seemed the most apt way to convert the extreme kinetic energy of his life into a legacy. So, we did.

As the Spring has stilled now, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Murray has started to bubble back up through Adam’s mind. He certainly has been on mine.

Prior to my coming to NENSA, this time of year involved many hours spent with Murray half a continent away in his miner’s shack turned satellite Vermont-haven in Crested Butte. I’d landed in CB as a coach fresh out of college in Maine, and Murray jumped in on partnering with Molly Susla (formerly of Maine) and I to coach our upper-level BKL skiers and build a club program infused with a very NENSA bent. Which is to say, all of our youth races had themes and became costume parties.

Murray’s favorite way to debrief every year was over lunch. I’d bike across town from my office, often in the middle of an April snowstorm, and drop my bike on the curb like I’d just finished my paper route. There was that kind of throwback innocence to the whole thing. This guy, who’d lived a whole life and was pushing 80 years old, insisting that I, his “boss,” had to come over to give him his “annual performance review.”

Once at the Banks place, I’d drink too many espressos, and Murray would toss out aphorisms culled from his life as a motivational teacher/ski coach like “never V1 when you can V2” and Terko’s favorite, “tighten your boots,” and we would chew on big ideas about program development interspersed with appreciations of the particular growth of one of the CB junior skiers, or a new coach who had really taken to their role that winter. Inevitably, he would pull out a slip of paper from his back pocket with a list of names and a circled number. “I did some brainstorming on kids who I think are ready for the Devo program,” he would say, and the number circled would be how many skiers he thought we could have in the program next year. My first year it was 20, then 40, then 60. “Hope you can find the skis, boss!” he’d say.

Murray and I always let those afternoons linger on and on as if they would never end. As if, if we did this odd mending-time perambulation with time itself, it’s scale would grow a little closer to the one the mountains out his kitchen window marched in, and the sixty years between us would blur, and we’d continue working on as partners forever. Of course, eventually the afternoon would end, and that seemed an acknowledgement of the timescale we were actually moving in.

As I biked home, my head would spin with the possibility. Murray’s slip of paper would work its way into my back pocket, and I’d stare at the number later, which almost entailed doubling the size of our still small program, asking “How are we going to do that?” Yet, come next winter, we almost always did.

For all the way that his ideas beamed with positivity and possibility, Murray also held that you ought to push things a little further than you thought they could go. Amid all his energy, there was a quiet reassurance he provided all of us in his pure passion for cross-country skiing. A Phy. Ed. teacher by trade who had tried every sport out there (including as a professional triathlete), he believed that this one – nordic skiing – had the perfect mix of qualities to make it his perferred way to grow through life. In an old NENSA video detailing the Bill Koch League, he put it simply, “in other little league sports, how many times do the parents cheer for the other team?!” He then turned to MNC regular Charlie Cobb, then a BKL-er, who chimes in, “and it’s fun,” to which Murray turns on a dime, “FUN! It wasn’t any FUN!?” in a way in which you know the congregation has already taken the sermon to heart.

Right now, as we sit down across New England and kindle new ideas about helping skiers grow, gain an appreciation of competition, and of the outdoors that our sport uniquely places them in a place to gain perspective on, we’re well-placed to carry Murray’s spirit forth, here in New England, and wherever we might get a next bonus ski.

Catch that old NENSA Video Feat. Murray, Charlie Cobb, and some other Familiar Faces Here

By John Morton | Vermont Sports | November 1st, 1999
This essay was originally broadcast on Vermont Public Radio.

My early cross-country ski racing career benefited from the guidance of John Caldwell, Putney School’s famous math teacher and ski coach. After the publication of his popular book Cross-Country Ski in 1964, Caldwell became the guru of nordic skiing here in America, and Olympic hopefuls migrated from across the country to work out in Putney, Vermont. Part of Caldwell’s magic was his easy-going, fun-loving attitude toward training.

Caldwell had a unique ability to make even the most demanding conditioning sessions seem fun, but John’s classic workout was The Tour. This was an endurance event that seldom had a planned route and never had a predetermined duration. More than just a workout, Caldwell’s tours were adventures, even expeditions. When the location was Putney, Caldwell would lead his group of National Team Members over the rolling hills, across brooks, through apple orchards, and deep into endless hardwood forests. Then he would disappear. Even in winter, breaking trail through unbroken powder or scampering across an icy crust, the crafty coach would somehow double back on his own tracks, leaving his mystified racers to find their way back to Putney on their own. More than once, exhausted skiers from the Rockies or Alaska hitchhiked back to Putney from the neighboring towns of Dummerston, Townsend, and even Westminster.

John Caldwell’s most memorable ski tour took place in Yellowstone National Park. In the late autumn of 1971, prior to the tryouts for the Sapporo Winter Olympics, National Team members, including cross-country skiers, nordic combined competitors, and biathletes had been invited to take advantage of the early season snow at Big Sky, Montana. The accommodations were great, there was plenty of snow, and the training was terrific.

But Big Sky is isolated. By Thanksgiving, after weeks of intense training and hundreds of kilometers on skis, the high strung Olympic hopefuls were climbing the walls. So Caldwell, Head Coach of the U.S. Cross-Country Team at the time, planned a diversion.

On Thanksgiving Day, he loaded up four rugged Jeep Wagoneers with athletes and headed south through the beautiful Gallatin Canyon. More than an hour later we reached the village of West Yellowstone, the western entrance to America’s first National Park. Both the town and the imposing Park Entrance were totally deserted. Barriers blocked the access road and signs made it clear that the Park was closed for the season. Caldwell left the lead vehicle and checked the abandoned Ranger Station. He returned and conferred with the other coaches. With a, “What the hell” attitude, they shifted the Wagoneers into four-wheel drive, plowed through a roadside snow bank, around the barricades and into the Park.

Then the fun really began! A race immediately developed down the snow-packed road to Madison Junction. Encouraged by the athletes, the coaches put those Jeeps through a deep-snow, four-wheel-drive, high-speed chase unlike anything they had ever experienced on a factory test track.
The thrill of speeding down the snow-packed road inspired our next adventure, skijoring. Someone had a length of rope, so we took turns whipping over the snow-covered road on our delicate cross-country skis, pulled by the Jeeps at 40 miles an hour! It was an unforgettable thrill.

We stopped several times to photograph animals: elk, bison, swans, geese, and even a coyote. Of course, having cross-country skis allowed the more determined photographers to test their courage by getting up close and personal with their wildlife subjects.

One of the westerners on the team had been in the Park before, and led us to a spot where a boiling, thermal spring overflowed into an icy river. We stripped down in the snow and gingerly found a narrow band of steaming water where the temperature was hot, but not scalding. A dozen exhausted athletes sat on the warm rocks, up to our chins in the strong current, relishing nature’s Jaccuzi. Someone handed each of us an ice-cold beer. After several weeks of two, and even three workouts a day, intensified by the unrelenting anxiety of vying for a spot on the Olympic Team,that soak in the hot spring was absolute heaven.

Bright red and steaming, we fumbled into our clothes and returned to the Jeeps. The coaches plowed on to Old Faithful. We parked in front of the magnificent wooden lodge and waited for the geyser’s hourly eruption. I vaguely remember Caldwell engaged in an animated conversation with the winter caretaker of the lodge, but then Old Faithful erupted, and we watched with rapt attention. When Mother Nature’s most reliable marvel sputtered to its conclusion, we loaded the Wagoneers and followed our tracks back to West Yellowstone. Totally relaxed from our dip in the hot spring, most of us slept until we reached the Park Entrance.

I woke to see our exit blocked by Park Service trucks, complete with flashing headlights and rotating beacons. Several armed Rangers, looking very official under their “Smokey the Bear” hats, stood in front of the roadblock. As Caldwell stepped out of the Jeep we rolled down the windows to hear what promised to be an entertaining exchange. John began by explaining that we had stopped on our way in to get permission, but that no one was around. I heard him use the phrase “Olympic Team” several times. The Rangers were not impressed. They simply glared at him until he was finished.

Then the fireworks began. The Head Ranger read Caldwell the riot act, enumerating in detail the federal infractions we had committed including, (but not limited to): illegally entering a National Park, speeding on an unmaintained road, harassing the wildlife, indecent exposure, consumption of alcohol in a restricted area, etc. etc. We had committed violations which could easily result in $24,000 in federal fines, and possibly jail time! It was the only time I have ever seen John Caldwell at a loss for words.

It was a very quiet ride back to Big Sky; partly because we were so tired, but mostly because we were convinced that something serious would result from our carelessness. Somehow, Caldwell smoothed it all over. None of us had to appear in court or even chip in for the fines.

John Caldwell is still admired and respected by a couple of generations of American cross-country skiers. His original book, Cross-Country Ski has been reprinted eight times, and has sold more than 500,000 copies. But, I suppose there are a couple of Park Rangers in West Yellowstone, Montana who still have their doubts about him, even after 25 years.