Skate along the trail
Quebec offers winter culture for those who love the snowy season
The wait for my rental car at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport last February was slow, but the talk was breakaway fast. I joined the line with a National Hockey League scout for the New Jersey Devils on his way to a tournament to look at promising teenage skaters.
“Skating is a way of life up here,” the native Québécois said, as my sturdy Nissan SUV pulled up, poised to plow through the snowy roads of southern Quebec where I’d come simply to skate.
Other than the Winter Olympics, ice skating doesn’t get a lot of attention among winter sports. It’s usually a “something for the kids” addition at a ski resort or an activity built around a city landmark, like the rink at Rockefeller Center in New York City or the ice sheet at Millennium Park in Chicago.
But as a winter lover who once travelled to Winnipeg to skate that city’s sculpture-dotted frozen river in below-zero temperatures, I was intrigued by the icy fount of adventurous possibilities in Quebec, Canada’s largest province, where it’s possible to escape the oval confines of what we normally think of as ice rinks and skate for long, sinuous stretches on frozen trails through forests and snowy landscapes.
Three freezing months at relatively low elevations has spawned a distinct winter culture. “Winters are very long and cold in Quebec,” said Robert McLeman, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. He and fellow scientist Colin Robertson run RinkWatch, a citizen science project where nearly 1,500 participants have submitted climate data and its effect on their homemade skating rinks.
Skating trails can be found across Canada. They embrace the landscape when little is growing and hark back to the origins of skating as a means of travel.
In Quebec, many parks and villages host skating areas that take many forms, from ribbons plowed on rivers to forests that are flooded to create skating mazes.
Having built my own front yard rink, I know these frozen skateways are not easily maintained. Forest paths involve cutting trails, building water barriers, flooding and freezing them, clearing fallen snow into sheet-side banks and continually conditioning the ice as it slaloms between trees. Ice might be a natural state, but skating ice is a wonder of human dedication.
Several of these ice innovations lie in Mauricie and Lanaudière, two of the 17 administrative regions that make up Quebec, roughly midway between Montreal and Quebec City. Together they bill themselves as “authentic Quebec,” home to 16th-century French settlements and rivers that were the original highways used by First Nations travellers and, later, French Canadian fur traders known as voyageurs. Logging and hydroelectric industries subsequently took advantage of the regions’ natural resources, more recently reframed as tourist draws.
In terms of tourism, winter is among the busiest seasons here. Snowmobilers come to sled inn-to-inn; “glissades,” or sledding runs, abound, from public parks to private resorts; and ice-fishing shanties create pop-up villages of down-padded anglers.
With ice skates in my carryon, I laced up to explore Quebec’s long, winding skating trails in a three-day ice quest.
Island skating trail
At Trois-Rivières, a two-hour drive from Montreal, the broad and swift St. Lawrence doesn’t freeze except in some sheltered bays. A pair of islands in the intersecting St. Maurice River creates three channels that meet the larger waterway, giving Trois-Rivières, the secondoldest francophone city in North America, its name.
On one of those islands, Île St. Quentin, park managers seasonally flood a two-kilometre ice-skating path. The frozen maze skirts the seaway, flowing with jagged cells of ice, and weaves into the hardwood forest behind it. Following the contours of the land, it had enough gradual downhills to persuade several skaters to wear helmets.
I laced my skates inside the park’s generous field house, which supplied a children’s corner with toys and books, and offered fat-tire bike rentals for rides on another trail, shared by snowshoers, that runs for three kilometres around the periphery of the island.
With just a few skaters sharing the ice on a sunny and windy weekday, I had the “sentier de patin,” or ice path, largely to myself, allowing me to skate the route in all directions without fear of collisions.
After an exploratory foray, slow and curious, I thrilled to make each iteration different, taking the first alley right away from the river and the second left toward it, circling a warming tent one way, then the other, and edging back on the inland route, taking occasional spurs in unanticipated directions in the exhilarating labyrinth that held me safe in its geometry.
Agri-tourism on ice
One winter, when Jean-Pierre Binette and Madeleine Courchesne, beekeepers in rural Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, about an hour north of Trois-Rivières, had three children under age nine, they flooded a small section of woods on their property.
Excited by the frozen forest playground, their children invited their friends, who invited their friends.
In 1997, the seasonal diversion became a secondary business as Le Domaine de la Forêt Perdue, or the Lost Forest, opened to the public, keeping a form of agri-tourism alive in winter (in summer, they offer a high-ropes course).
“We were the first skating path in Quebec, and now we are training people who are opening trails around the province,” Thérèse Deslauriers, the managing director of the Forêt Perdue, said, as she worked the rustic entry house that doubles as a retail shop for honey products.
Outside, beyond the skate rental tent, 15 kilometres of ice-ways wove through pine and hardwood forests dotted with farm pens occupied by goats, sheep, ducks, deer and more exotic animals, including an ostrich.
Next to the alpaca enclosure, a repurposed phone booth dispensed handfuls of animal feed for a quarter.
A frozen river
After an overnight snowfall of 10 centimetres, the nine-kilometre skating path on the Assomption River at Parc Louis-Querbes in Joliette, about midway between Le Baluchon and Montreal, was already open and plowed by 9 a.m., serving a smattering of speedskaters and slower gliders.
I skated hard for an hour, covering the entire route, and was not alone. Like runners in warmer cities, the earliest Joliette skaters came out to exercise in the light morning traffic. By the time I circled back to the park field house just after 10 a.m., a food shack next to the ice had opened, serving beignets and tea to the growing collection of families teaching their under-10s to skate by holding onto loaner sleds and sharing the wonder of skating on a seasonally stilled river.
I intended to leave the river and head straight to the airport in Montreal but couldn’t resist another skating stop so close to it. Diverting 30 minutes north to Bois de Belle-Rivière, I took a final 2.5-kilometre spin on yet another frozen forest path.
In this age of vanishing ice, I skated with a profound appreciation for the transformation of winter and the spirit of ice makers to delight those who love the season.