Until recently, Ken Hunt had been making plans to open an outdoor rink on this pond, as the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority allowed him to do since 2000. This year, the provincial agency forbade winter activities on the ice.
Long before the bureaucrats and a warming climate intervened, Ken Hunt was known all over town as the Ice Angel.
He got his wings in a most Canadian way: as founder, scraper, flooder and general maestro of the Palgrave Pond outdoor rink, about an hour’s drive northwest of Toronto.
In a country where pond hockey is canonized on the five-dollar bill, this once qualified as God’s work.
Not anymore. As local governments grapple with the risks of a warming climate, Mr. Hunt is being told that the countless predawn hours he spends perfecting ice for an appreciative community are no longer welcome.
“Those days are gone,” he says, surveying ice conditions from the shoreline. “They took away our winter sport.”
Signs at the edge of Palgrave Pond now warn against trespassing and alert passersby of video surveillance.
The season had started full of promise. As December began, a veneer of ice crept across Palgrave Pond. Mr. Hunt made his usual preparations: checking hockey nets for holes, tuning up the Polaris ATV he uses to pull a jury-rigged Zamboni and straightening pondside benches where generations of skaters have tugged on laces with numb fingers.
All that groundwork came to a sudden halt on Dec. 3, when Mr. Hunt and some devoted helpers met with an official from the surrounding Town of Caledon to share their rink plans for the coming season. “That’s where we were told there will be no plans because nobody is allowed on the pond anymore,” Mr. Hunt says. “We were all stunned. Nobody had ever said anything about this before.”
The pond Mr. Hunt has maintained for the past 24 years is under the jurisdiction of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), a provincial agency responsible for preventing floods and protecting natural areas. Since 2000, it has tolerated Mr. Hunt’s rink-making, even striking an agreement with the Town of Caledon in 2021 ensuring skating could continue as long as the municipality took on legal liability.
Unbeknownst to Mr. Hunt, that agreement expired in March. Since then TRCA has adopted a firmer stance. “[T]he use of the Palgrave Reservoir is restricted and no activities on the ice will be permitted,” TRCA CEO John MacKenzie wrote in a November letter to the Town.
The TRCA denied an interview request but acknowledged by e-mail that climate change has brought increasing safety concerns. “Skating is prohibited due to fluctuating water levels, driven by changing climate and inconsistent temperatures, which make the ice unpredictable and unsafe, posing an increased risk to public safety,” wrote Sameer Dhalla, director of TRCA’s Development and Engineering Services.
Mr. Hunt didn’t have any long-term climate forecasting in mind when he started in 2000. He simply wanted to surprise his children with a little taste of his upbringing on the Gaspé Peninsula, where he spent long winter days playing shinny on local rivers. So he woke up at 2 a.m. one December morning and scraped out a rudimentary rink, where his three kids spent a rosy-cheeked day doing their best impressions of Michelle Kwan and Wayne Gretzky.
It wasn’t long before the entire town descended upon the rink. Mr. Hunt liked the idea of local kids eschewing Nintendo games for hockey sticks, so he kept up an exhausting daily schedule, waking at 3 a.m. for ice prep before heading off to work at a rebar company at 5 a.m. After dinner, he’d return for more scraping and flooding of rinks that could measure up to 180 feet in length.
“Sometimes I didn’t sleep at all,” he says of those early ice seasons, which extended from mid-December through to March break. “I’d get home and my jacket would be so stiff with ice I couldn’t get it off.”
One season grew into 20. A single shovel was replaced with several hundred feet of hose and the ATV-drawn Zamboni. He and his family built benches and an outhouse.
Mr. Hunt keeps his ice maintenance gear in a storage container by the pond. One sign warns people to be mindful of the weather and check the Town of Caledon website for skating conditions.
In recent years, the task has grown both harder and easier. A neighbour, Shawn Williamson, started helping out. The Rotary Club donated a proper outhouse. Local businesses pitched in with water pumps, hoses and hockey equipment.
But in January, 2021, low ice formation, combined with a spate of people falling through Toronto-area ice, prompted police and other agencies all over Southern Ontario to warn against venturing onto ice. By February of that year, the TRCA had told Mr. Hunt to stop making his beloved rinks.
One of his daughters, Nicole Wilkins, created a change.org petition that garnered more than 4,000 signatures. The TRCA soon retreated and signed a three-year agreement with the Town of Caledon to allow skating as long as the municipality took on insurance, liability, maintenance and other responsibilities. Part of the deal required Mr. Hunt to conduct daily ice-thickness tests in four locations and only allow skating when the ice reached eight inches. The agreement saved the ice, but it placed a new legal and administrative burden on the ice-makers. Ms. Wilkins had to create a non-profit organization, Palgrave Pond Community Inc., so it could enter into a legal agreement with Caledon to maintain the ice.
Mr. Hunt has years worth of handwritten notes on the worsening ice levels at the pond.
With that battle behind them, ensuing winters brought the worst rink-making conditions Mr. Hunt had ever seen. He opened the pond for a couple of days in 2022-23. Last season, it didn’t open at all.
Caledon Councillor Mario Russo now believes it’ll stay closed for good, saying the TRCA’s rink closing marks “an unfortunate end of an era” that Caledon is powerless to overcome.
Mr. Hunt isn’t so sure. He and Ms. Wilkins have launched a new petition and distributed a detailed rebuttal of the TRCA’s position via Facebook. On a recent December day, he crunched his way around the snow-crusted pond to check on a shipping container full of kid-sized hockey sticks, nets and ice equipment. They should be put to use, he says.
And so should the Ice Angel.
“I’m still willing to keep going,” he says. “We’re not giving up.”
Winter’s tales: More from The Globe and Mail
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