Watch any ski race on television and you will hear the same dull, persistent background clanging.

CNN: The art of noise in sport: How the cowbell came of age

From 18 to 20 February, the park also stages the Gatineau Loppet, a three-day international cross-country ski race which plays host to 3, 000 skiers from about 20 countries.

BBC: Embracing winter in Ottawa

Since the 2006 debut of a race series called the Colorado Ski Mountaineering Cup, the number of competitions has more than tripled to 16.

WSJ: Ski Mountaineering: Now They're Racing Up the Hill

Like Nordic skiing, a 50-kilometer race over relatively horizontal terrain, ski mountaineering relies less on gravity than human exertion.

WSJ: Ski Mountaineering: Now They're Racing Up the Hill

The Kitzbuhel Ski Club, host of the annual Hahnenkamm race, can look back on a long history and development of the event.

BBC: Kitzbuhel, Austria

Jonathan Shefftz, an economics consultant and former ski racing coach at Harvard and MIT, organizes a three-event race series in New England.

WSJ: Ski Mountaineering: Now They're Racing Up the Hill

Sixty years before Dartmouth undergrads schussed Mount Moosilauke in what is popularly regarded as the first downhill ski competition in the U.S., and 40 years before the first downhill race in Europe, miners--bored and snowbound in California's High Sierra--had already raced.

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