Whitefish Skijoring 2011 - Are you ready? Whitefish Winter Carnival 2011

As winter starts to ramp up, so do the horses, riders and skiers, and it is time again for the Whitefish Winter Carnival Ski Joring Event. The revival of ski joring to the Whitefish Winter Carnival will enter its 7th year during the weekend of January 29, 30, 31, 2010, with another exciting year of the interesting mix of two of Montana's favorite sports: horses and skiing.




The Whitefish version of skijoring involves a horse and rider pulling a skier around a horseshoe shaped 800 foot long course at high speeds over jumps and around gates. The sport of skijoring began several hundred years ago in Scandinavian countries as a way to travel during the long winters. Skijoring found its way to North America, where ranchers attached a long rope to the saddle horn of a horse that was ridden at high speeds down a long straight-away. Currently, the sport of equestrian skijoring has become a highly specialized competitive sport, where competitors must navigate a course of jumps, gates and sometime spear rings. (NASJA Website, 2007) http://nasja.com/

This year's competition will have three divisions: Open division for the most experienced competitors; a Sport division for those who have entered the event more than three times or have won in a previous event, and new this year is the Novice Division which will be for anyone who is entering for the 1st-3rd time and has not won in any division. There will be prizes for each division including cash awards for winners based on the event's entry fee purse. Registration will be January 29th, from 5:30 - 8:30 pm at the Great Northern Brewing Company in Whitefish.

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Travel & Events

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• Whitefish Winter Carnival
• Montana
• Big Mountain
• Big Sky
• Snow Rodeo
• Horse Race
• Ski race
• Flathead Valley
• Whitefish Mountain Resort
• The Lodge at Whitefish Lake