Joey Payeur
The mild winter so far has brought a smile to just about everybody’s face in Fort Frances.
Trevor McKinnon is not among them.
The supervisor with the Town of Fort Frances has been fighting what’s so far been mostly a losing battle to get the community’s three outdoor ice rinks up and running for public use thanks to the above-average temperatures of late.
“It’s been a terrible year for making ice,” said McKinnon.
“The only one up is the one across from McIrvine Park on Colonization Road West, and we only got that one underway just before Christmas,” he noted.
“Dave Taggart has been helping out by doing some flooding of that one at night,” McKinnon added.
“But we’ve got no volunteers that we can even get the east end rink and the north end rink [by the old Sixth Street School] up and running.
“Since I’ve been working here, we’ve always had the three rinks up well before Christmas holidays,” said McKinnon.
“This is unheard of.”
McKinnon was hoping the latter two rinks could be functional either later this week or early next week if the mercury dips low enough for long enough, although the rest of this week is forecast to remain fairly mild.
“It holds us up with the amount of water we can put on at one time,” he explained.
“It won’t freeze fast enough if you put on too much water.
“And if you put on a bunch of water and then it snows, you’ve got a heck of a mess on your hands,” he added.
McKinnon wouldn’t venture a guess as to the exact amount of water necessary to flood the three rinks enough to get them in usable shape each winter.
“It’s not like in Devlin, where they have a concrete pad underneath,” he noted.
“It’s just grass for these ones here,” he remarked. “You just have to keep adding water little by little until it freezes properly and it’s skateable.”
McKinnon considers the rinks an essential part of outdoor recreation in a community that typically sees significantly more cold weather in a calendar year than warm weather.
“The rinks get used a ton so I think they’re quite important,” he remarked.
“There’s always kids on them and if we flood one day, you can tell they were used by the end of the next day.
“Unfortunately, this is going to be a really short season unless we have a really late spring,” he added.
