Forest skating trails are a winter wonderland. Here’s a few to try across Canada | Canada Voices

The ribbon of ice wound smoothly away, between spruce flocked with overnight snow. Skaters slipped into the woods and vanished. Frigid conditions at the six-kilometre skating trail at Patinage en Forêt in Lac-des-Loups, Que., didn’t faze the weekend crowd that had come to experience a frozen, forested playground.

In fact, the conditions were perfect – ideal, even. Each winter I take road trips in search of great skating ice. An archipelago of outdoor rinks in Montreal and Quebec City once scratched the itch; in recent years, I’d acquired a taste for more adventurous terrain. Instead of an endless looping circle, I’d come to experience one of the forest skating trails popping up across Canada, in locations from the Maritimes to British Columbia.

We traded a beach resort for an ice slide on our family escape to Quebec City

“As a child I always dreamed of skating through the forest, but I never thought it was possible,” said Patinage en Forêt owner Dave Mayer. (Tickets for his skating area run $17.39 for adults.) Then he saw footage of Domaine Enchanteur (adult tickets $27.40), a network of ice trails near Trois-Rivières, Que., that’s widely seen as Canada’s first such project. It was his childhood dream, come to life. “I said to my wife: ‘I don’t know how, but I’m going to do that,’” recalled Mayer.

During my weekend visit in February, the trails were quiet despite the buzzing skate chalet; one-way trails let the skaters space out easily, passing each other at signposted intersections. I heard only the hissing slick of ice underfoot, the pop of branches flexing in crisp air.

This ski club has quietly maintained wilderness trails for 50 years

I’d woken that morning in Old Chelsea, a picturesque village amid the low-lying Gatineau Hills of Quebec’s Outaouais region, just outside of Ottawa and a gateway to Gatineau Park. It’s where I’d booked a weekend stay in its central Lofts du Village: strategically close to multiple ice trails, restaurants and post-skate relaxation in the thermal waters at Nordik Spa Village.

Driving northwest toward Patinage en Forêt, however, Chelsea’s chic gastropubs gave way to small-town casse-croûtes. Few outsiders used to venture up here, Mayer explained. But since he opened the trails in 2017, Mayer has met visitors who travelled to tiny Lac-des-Loups from Sweden or New Zealand or London — all keen to lace up their skates and explore the forested land where Mayer’s Irish ancestors once grew potatoes.

Robert McLeman is a professor of environmental science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the director of citizen science ice-monitoring program RinkWatch, which uses backyard and community rinks to study climate change. He notes Canadian skaters have long made the most of ice. McLeman remembers reading Quebec author Roch Carrier’s descriptions, in Our Life with the Rocket: The Maurice Richard Story, of the informal skate routes that once turned Montreal neighborhoods into playful labyrinths.

“Back alleys and side streets literally became skating trails that kids would use to skate around town,” he said. “On prairie farms they would have old sloughs, ponds and watering holes for livestock … you could almost call it opportunistic skating.”

Skating trails are constructed by spraying – and smoothing – layer after layer of water. But they capture that enterprising spirit, finding ways to play where recreation would otherwise be limited. The 15 kilometres of forest skating trails at Domaine Enchanteur turned a failed pine plantation into a wonderland dotted with warming huts, cocoa stops and petting-zoo enclosures. When Toronto’s free-to-use Bentway Ice Skating Trail opened in 2018, it transformed a marginal urban area. “The space underneath elevated expressways isn’t the most attractive in the world, but that’s a good use for it,” McLeman said. ˙

For my second day of skating in Quebec, I headed from Chelsea to nearby Le Sentier du Petit Pingouin (adult tickets $20.88), a meandering 5.5-kilometre network of trails winding between the snow-covered greens of a golf club. When owner Carl Chénier took over management of Club de Golf Touraine from his father, he knew he needed a way to generate revenue through western Quebec’s long winters. “We started out in 2021 with just a short loop trail,” he recalled. “But 500 people came that very first weekend.”

Many were locals. In keeping with Canada’s skating heritage, the best forest skating trail is often one that’s close to home. Isabella Mehlitz, a city employee in Fredericton, N.B., heads to the kilometre-long Forest Skate at nearby Mactaquac Provincial Park (adult tickets $8.70), which stays open late to the glow of trail-side lights. “It’s the kind of winter memory that sticks with you,” she said.

Toronto-based marketer Emanuel Petrescu loves the 1.3-kilometre forest skating trail at Arrowhead Provincial Park (park day use $18.58) in Muskoka, two and a half hours north of the big city. “It’s a proper trail, not like a frozen lake,” he said. “It’s more dynamic, more exciting and more fun.”

Kristin Kelly of Port Carling, Ont., takes her six- and three-year-old boys to the 1.2-kilometre ice trail in Bala that circles a forest-wrapped cranberry bog at Muskoka Lakes Farm & Winery (adult weekend trail pass $20). “I recently took our oldest son and skated around the trail, and we just had the best time together,” she said.

Massage therapist Megan Holley of Naramata, B.C., visits the nearby one-kilometre Adventure Skating Loop at Apex Mountain Resort. Just outside Penticton, the trail (tickets $15) passes through an evergreen forest with night skating, too. “It’s very beautiful, and feels very Canadian,” Holley said. “Like an adventure, or outing, rather than just to the rink or back.”

For some, that adventure is worth a longer journey. Back in Quebec, after looping twice around the rolling ice track of Le Sentier du Petit Pingouin, I ducked into the shipping container that serves as its warming hut. Inside were a pair of women who’d arrived from Nova Scotia that morning.

“Everyone else in the Halifax airport was heading to Mexico,” said Kerri Lafond, as she laced up a well-used pair of hockey skates. “They were like, ‘You’re going to Ottawa now?'” Lafond and her partner, Alexa Stewart, planned to visit five skating areas before returning to Nova Scotia after a three-night stay.

“It’s minus 24 C and we don’t even care,” Stewart said. “We’re so excited to skate.”

The writer was a guest of Tourisme Outaouais. It did not review or approve the story before publication.