THUNDER BAY — Skaters are hitting the ice across Thunder Bay this weekend.
This rush to the City's outdoor rinks follows their annual reopening on Friday afternoon.
“It’s excellent to see. This is an above-average year for opening, based on the number of sites that we were able to open. As of Friday, we had 16 of our 31 sites open and we’ll be updating that through the weekend and into early next week,” said Cory Halvorsen, manager of Parks and Open Spaces for the City of Thunder Bay.
The City has 44 ice surfaces (see map) spread across its 31 sites, including close to 13 boarded sites, eight supervised sites, three ponds and two specialty sites: Vickers Park skating trail and Prince Arthur’s Landing.
Halvorsen said they aim to open these rinks before kids start their Christmas holidays.
“We want to have as many sites open for the holiday break. We do focus heavily on our supervised sites where we have the heated change facilities, but some of the other boarded unsupervised sites and some of our specialty sites also get some extra attention in December,” said Halvorsen.
“Some of them are actually easier to get up and running based on how level the site is, so that’s why we have a combination of different sites opening.”
With updates continuing through the holiday break, the City expects everything will be up and running on all sites, likely in the first week of January, if they continue to have the support of temperatures for flooding.
Rylan Kine-Hymers was among many kids skating at the West Thunder Community Centre this Sunday. He said it’s awesome having these rinks in the winter when he doesn’t have practice.
He said you can ‘just come out here and keep playing.’
“It’s awesome. I love playing out here with my friends. It’s nice. Well, it’s cold, but it’s great being out here,” said Kine-Hymers.
However, Kine-Hymers said he does not think he went once last year since it was ‘just too hot.’
“Last year was not a good year for outdoor rinks. The temperatures were just too warm. I don’t believe we opened any sites until January 5th, and that was a handful of the supervised sites, so that was the first (time), I believe, and we’ve just had nothing open over the holiday break,” said Halvorsen.
A lot of the time, he added it wasn’t even the whole program compared to now and with 11/12 weeks to the season, it was ‘pretty impactful.’
In 2023, outdoor rinks were reduced from 39 to 31. With fewer sites to maintain and recover when temperatures dropped, Halvorsen said it did help deal with the warmer temperatures and is hopeful that’s the experience they’ll have this winter.
“If we have a colder winter, even if we have a few warm days, we should be able to recover the number of sites we have as quickly as possible,” said Halvorsen.
He said it’s very nice to see a more typical start to the season where they can offer this service through the holidays.
Calen Charban was happy to have the cold weather this year and the rinks open. He said this year is way better than last since it was too warm and the rinks were barely open.
“When I don’t have a practice or a game, I like to go play hockey, so it’s pretty nice to have the rink open,” said Charban.
The outdoor rinks are also a good escape from his hockey games and practices.
“You can do whatever you want. You don’t have to really listen to your coaches, so you can just fool around and play. You don’t have to do drills,” said Charban.
Charban hopes for a new hockey stick from Santa.
Halvorsen hopes for a colder winter.
“Parks operations staff have done an excellent job getting everything up and running to date and we’ll continue to work hard at getting all the sites open and keeping them open throughout any warm spells we might see,” said Halvorsen.
He encourages everybody to come out and enjoy the rinks.
“It’s a short season even when we do have good temperatures, so please come out and have a skate, come play some hockey and enjoy the winter,” said Halvorsen.