Parks Canada turns lakes into snow canvases
Promotion a chance to create art in pristine landscapes
An hours-long journey into La Mauricie National Park, found halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, leads seasoned snowshoers into a pristine landscape: Two frozen, snow-covered lakes, now acting as canvases for ephemeral art.
Parks Canada has recently been promoting their new snow tag challenge, offering people the chance to create massive snow drawings on Lac Solitaire or Lac aux Chevaux in the east end of the Quebec park.
Each lake offers a canvas far larger than a football field, giving would-be snow artists the chance to create striking artwork that’s viewable from several lookout points.
Some use a GPS or compass; others skip navigational tools entirely. The entire process, including a trek to the lakes and the creation of the artwork, takes over five hours. The drawings are attracting attention on the Parks Canada Facebook page, with thou- sands of shares and likes since the photos were posted late last month.
One of the photos, shared more than 4,000 times, shows a massive 150-by-180 metre drawing of a bicycle made by four people including Sesilina Rouault. On Facebook, Rouault wrote in French how the snow tag activity combined fun, laughter and physical exercise, and said the giant drawing took two hours to complete.
While this seems like a quintessentially Canadian art opportunity, snow tagging actually echoes the work of established snow artists from outside the Great White North.
San Francisco-based artist Sonja Hinrichsen is known for her swirling, circular snow drawings on frozen lakes and rivers in Colorado.
On a Skype call from Finland, Hinrichsen says she started drawing while playing with snowshoes for the first time during a 2009 artist residency in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
Since then, Hinrichsen has gathered dozens of volunteers to create various spiral snow drawings throughout the state, and has also created artwork in France and upstate New York. “It’s an immersive outdoor experience,” she says.
Across the pond, the world’s foremost snow artist, Simon Beck — who has more than 285,000 likes on Facebook — has been creating intricate designs at European ski resorts throughout for the past decade.
“When I started (in 2004) I had absolutely no idea how it was going to develop. I was sort of regarded as some kind of mad Englishman who was going to get buried in an avalanche sooner or later,” Beck says over the phone from his winter apartment by Les Arcs ski resort in France.
With a background in engineering and cartography, Beck’s designs are complex and mathematical in nature, often using fractals, or repeating patterns, such as the Sierpinski triangle and Koch snowflake.
But closer to home, those creating snow art at La Mauricie National Park don’t need to worry about such complexity. So far, designs have included a far simpler snowflake, a guitar and, in true Canadian fashion, a beaver.