With the announcement of the 1997 BC Winter Games awarded to Campbell River, Oskar Valdal set out to create the Courtenay Biathlon Association and build a Biathlon venue at Mount Washington Alpine Resort.
Through tremendous effort from many in time, equipment and financial contributions, building of the biathlon range and cabin started in the vicinity of the current Raven Lodge parking lot.
The original 6 lane range was cleared with thanks to John Edgett Excavating and Bill Thomas of Timberwest. Construction of the cabin later followed by Oskar and a crew of volunteers.
It was an exciting time to be able to host this first BC Winter Games event and showcase the beautiful site for biathlon on Vancouver Island.
In 2001, Mt. Washington decided to build the new Raven Lodge for its Nordic venue, so the biathlon range and cabin were moved approximately 500 meters north to its present location. Fortunately, by this point in time, the 2010 Winter Olympics had been awarded to Vancouver, which then provided more funding opportunities for winter sports and the development of what would become an expanded range with 26 lanes.
As one of the first recipients for funding from the Legacy’s Now Society and a number of other grant and funding sources including the Western Economic Development fund, over the next decade, targets and other equipment were accumulated. Strathcona Nordic Ski Club joined up with us adding to our timing equipment which to this day we share. The next phase of range development was the permanent range grading, foundations for targets and wall, more targets, bullet boxes, and cabin expansion.
During this period, we had been selected to host a NorAM Cup, had hosted the Cadet Canada National Biathlon Championships and two IPC World Cups, first in 2007 and then in 2009.
In preparation to host international team training prior to 2010 Olympic Winter Games the target system was fully automated with funding through a partnership of Comox Valley Economic Society, Coast Sustainability Trust and others.
It has been inspiring for all club members to have hosted International teams for training at our range in 2009 and 2010 prior to the Olympics and have had Canada’s National Biathlon Team here for spring training 3 times.
We look forward to the future and opportunities to host the world as the Vancouver Island Biathlon Club Range.
The key ingredient to our various partnerships over the years was community involvement and untold numbers of small contributors towards development of a world class training facility.
Our main partners for development to date are: Mount Washington Alpine Resort, Cadets Canada, Kurvinen Targets Systems (Finland), Save-On-Foods, Thrifty Foods and many, many volunteer hours of club members and non-members.
A true community involvement!
