Crews have taken to the Rideau Canal to begin flooding operations ahead of the famed Skateway’s hoped-for opening later this winter, though when lace-up season starts exactly is still anyone’s guess. Read MoreWorkers have been spraying icy jets of water from pumps on the canal. But warming temperatures may one day require more radical measures.
Workers have been spraying icy jets of water from pumps on the canal. But warming temperatures may one day require more radical measures.
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Crews have taken to the Rideau Canal to begin flooding operations ahead of the famed Skateway’s hoped-for opening later this winter, though when lace-up season starts exactly is still anyone’s guess.
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Looking very Oompa Loompa-like in their full-body orange snowsuits, the workers have been spotted spraying icy jets of water from a number of pumps on the canal as well as in a series of promotional video clips posted to the Rideau Canal’s Skateway’s social-media accounts.
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The team began Sunday, Dec. 14, by flooding a section of the canal between Patterson Creek Bridge in the Glebe and Bank Street near Lansdowne Park.
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The Evening Citizen
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“They use pumps to draw water from below the ice surface and help build the thickness needed to safely open the Skateway,” read the post, which warns peopled to stay off the canal for now.
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The team’s work drilling holes and pumping water from them to layer and thicken the ice often leaves magical patterns of nearly perfect intersecting circles furrowed on the white surface.
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Operations continued Monday, with the team flooding north of Patterson Creek to the rest area at Concord Street North, according to Valérie Dufour, senior manager of strategic communications with the National Capital Commission, which sets up, maintains and operates the Skateway.
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“The recent consistently cold temperatures have provided an excellent start for ice-building operations,” Dufour wrote in an email to the Citizen. “While milder temperatures are expected later this week, we hope for a minimal impact on ice formation.”
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Temperatures in Ottawa could rise above zero on Wednesday and Thursday.
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Why I love skating on the Rideau Canal Skateway at night
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Once called the world’s “longest” rink, the Rideau Canal has generally been referred to as the “largest” since the Nestaweya River Trail in Winnipeg laid claim to the first title 20 years ago.
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The Rideau Canal, though frequently the locus of impromptu (sometimes reckless) skating escapades in earlier eras of Ottawa history, first became a site of government-sanctioned skating in 1971, when then-NCC chair Douglas Fullerton sent a crew out with hand shovels to clear a five-kilometre stretch.
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The skating surface then occupied a section of the canal from the National Arts Centre to Bronson Avenue and opened on Dec. 18 — one of the earliest starts in the history of the Skateway, according to the Historical Society of Ottawa website, and not to be repeated.
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Indeed, thanks to increasingly warmer temperatures in Ottawa, the canal has in more recent years struggled to open at all. In 2023, it remained shuttered altogether. Seasons, meanwhile, have grown short.
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