Warming climate, wacky weather create skating trail trials and tribulations

In 2023, it wasn't cold enough in Ottawa to skate on the Rideau Canal. In 2024, it was only cold enough in Winnipeg to allow skating on its rivers for nine days.

What used to be taken for granted in Canada — winter weather cold enough to allow skating on rivers and ponds — has become a meteorological throw of the dice, thanks to the long-term effects of climate change coupled with the natural variability of weather from year to year.

David Phillips, a climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said winters have warmed in Canada by an average of 4 C over the past 77 years.

Over the past decade alone, he said, Canada has lost an average of two to three weeks of sub-zero temperatures.

"The result of that is that you can't grow ice," Phillips said in an interview on Monday from his home in Barrie, Ont. 

"That's why people are seeing things they haven't seen when they were youths, when it would be automatic by a certain date that you'd go skating on the Rideau Canal or on the Red River."

The organizations that manage the skating trails in Ottawa and Winnipeg have been forced to adapt to the warmer and in some cases, more unpredictable weather.

In the Manitoba capital, it has been cold enough so far this season to begin preparing the Nestaweya River Trail along the Assiniboine River near The Forks. There is 36 centimetres of ice on the river, which is more than enough to support the weight of ice-making machines and people, said Dave Pancoe, a manager responsible for the skating trail at The Forks.

That said, a late-season period of high water has left the port at The Forks encrusted in so much silt, the approach to the river is as spongy as dough and unsafe to use, Pancoe said. To mitigate this curveball, workers have built scaffolding to allow people on foot and on skates to access the river trail as soon as on New Year's Day.

"We just have to be more nimble," Pancoe said Monday in an interview at The Forks. "The days that we can get out on the ice, we have to be able to react to that quickly, and then when we have to get off quick, we have to be able to do that, also."

WATCH | Skating on Canadian lakes and rivers more of an ideal than a reality with our changing winters:

In 2020, high water on the Assiniboine prevented the river trail from opening at all. The previous year, it was open for 79 days.

Highly variable conditions have also made it difficult for the National Capital Commission to prepare the skating trail on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa.

After the full-season closure in 2023, the trail returned this year with the help of the use of lighter equipment that allowed workers on to the trail earlier, NCC spokesperson Benoit Desjardins said in a statement.