Assahafa.com
Outdoor rinks have long been a staple of Canadian winters, but the seasons are getting shorter and less predictable with more warm spells making it difficult to maintain the ice and keep it open.
In every small municipality with its own outdoor rink, that ice surface is always a community hub of activity, says Craig Beaton.
As an operations manager for the Town of Diamond Valley, he maintains Foothill County’s Scott Seaman Sports Rink, which has high demand for ice time from hockey players, figure skaters and kids of all ages. But as Canadian winters warm up over time, rink workers like Beaton are seeing skating seasons become shorter and more unpredictable.
Warming climate, wacky weather create skating trail trials and tribulations
On top of being popular community gathering spaces, outdoor rinks also make learning winter sports more accessible, and provide an outlet for physical activity during a time of year where that’s more rare outdoors.
In fact, outdoor rinks are such a staple of Canadian life that the International Ice Hockey Federation estimates there are roughly 5,000 of them across the country.
But Beaton has noticed that increasingly sporadic weather patterns in the last 10 to 15 years have made his job more of a roller-coaster to keep winter ice surfaces open. That pressure has been magnified in recent seasons.
“We’re becoming a little bit more aware of the challenges the last two, three years,” Beaton said.
“We are experiencing more frequent shutdowns because of temperatures. Obviously, if the ice is too soft or starts cooling, we can’t use it. So we have to shut it down.”
The rink Beaton maintains has a roof and a refrigerated pad to help it better withstand volatile temperature shifts, and yet it still shut down a couple times last season due to warm air, before it closed for the season in February.
Closing for the season before March used to be a rarity, Beaton said, but now it’s more common. He also says he’s noticed more chinooks in recent years, which have long been the biggest challenge outdoor rinks in southern Alberta face.
Doug Giles, a volunteer with the community association in Calgary’s southwest neighbourhood of Braeside, has helped maintain that area’s outdoor rink for five seasons, and he’s always dealt with fickle weather. But in recent seasons, Giles has noticed even higher highs and lower lows — all during a shrinking skating season.
The sweet spot to set up the ice is between –7 and –17 C, Giles says. Warm spells and chinooks can create yellow blisters on the ice or turn sections of it to slush, and make it too difficult to make ice. But weather that’s too cold can also make the ice too brittle.
The increasingly volatile temperature shifts frustrate Giles because of how he’s seen the neighbourhood rely on the rink, and how he’s seen people traveling to Calgary from out of town seek out his rink because of it’s reputation for consistently good ice.
“As long as mother nature doesn’t hold all the cards, which she normally does, we like to try to accommodate where we can.” Giles said.
“I feel so bad sometimes if we can’t clear the snow, or we have an equipment malfunction where we can’t work on something or it’s too cold to make ice. We’ve actually had to steer people away.”
Warmer winters across Canada
Giles and Beaton’s experience is common across Canada, RinkWatch director Robert McLeman said.
McLeman, an environmental studies professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, has worked on a citizen science initiative called RinkWatch since 2013. The project asks people around North America to help environmental scientists monitor winter weather trends by submitting information about skating conditions on outdoor rinks and ponds.
RinkWatch’s findings from more than 1,400 rinks, back up the notion that more freeze-thaw cycles in the winter are leading to shorter, milder and more unpredictable skating seasons.
“These are important community gathering places at a time of year where we don’t have a lot of them, and where getting outside is so important for mental and physical health for ourselves and our kids,” McLeman said.
“It would be a real shame to lose that part of our culture.”
RinkWatch’s 2023-24 report noted it was one of the most challenging seasons since the project started, with an unusually warm December and January. Many rinks in southern Ontario, Atlantic Canada and the northeastern U.S. never opened at all. In Ottawa, the Rideau Canal, which welcomed more than a million visitors as recently as 2018-19, didn’t open to skaters last season, and was only open for two weeks the year prior.
NCC explores adapting standards around opening Rideau Canal Skateway
Less accessible outdoor rinks also has an effect on how accessible hockey is for many. With hockey participation dropping as the cost to play becomes more prohibitive, McLeman said the average six-year-old who wants to learn the sport but can’t afford equipment costs and league fees, has less opportunity to do so without free outdoor rinks.
“It’s not just the goal that your kid is going to be the next Sidney Crosby or Hayley Wickenheiser,” McLeman said. “It’s more to give your kid the chance to play the game and learn the sport of hockey, or learn how to skate.”
Modern ice solutions
RinkWatch monitors how winters are changing in different cities, and forecasts how those shifts will continue in future decades. Its findings already point to recent evolutions like Edmonton winters becoming more like Calgary’s, with more swings in its temperature and later starts to the skating season.
But one solution that McLeman has seen become more common in Ontario and Quebec is refrigerated ice surfaces. More cities are building refrigerated rinks outdoors, which are more expensive to run, but can stay open for longer than traditional rinks.
In Calgary, one community has already picked up no this trend in the University District. Central Commons Park has a skating rink that uses a chiller system to keep the ice cool and extend its season into mid-March, longer than most rinks around the city. It also helps the rink withstand warm spells through the season.
Shona Waddell, University of Calgary Properties Group director of property management and leasing, notes that the rink can stay open until it’s consistently 10 C.
“We can weather the chinooks in Calgary much better than a traditional ice rink or a local community association rink that wouldn’t have any supplemental cooling. So we get a much longer season out of our rink,” Waddell said.
But the University District’s refrigerated rink was an expensive labour of love over multiple years that was difficult to open, Waddell said. It’s not an option that every community association can afford to pursue, and in the meantime, more outdoor rink workers will struggle to keep popular community rinks open to the public.
“I’m in my 50s. It’s not my imagination that winters were longer or colder when I was a kid, the data supports that,” McLeman said. “It’s right across Canada we see this that winters are shorter, they’re milder, there’s more of these freeze-thaw cycles in the middle of winter.”
Source: cbc
