Skating on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa. Photo provided.
The Prep Hockey team had the weekend of January 24-25 off from games. It is unusual to have a weekend off in the last half of the season, so a small group of players decided to leave Lake Placid for a little road trip up to Ottawa, Ontario. Devin Smith ’26, Cody and Kevin Betsch ’26, and Parker Thompson ’26 headed across the border to stay at my house. The goal of the trip was to skate on the Rideau Canal.
So, what is the big deal about skating on the Rideau Canal? Well, firstly, the canal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is the oldest continuously operated canal system in North America. After the War of 1812, information regarding the United States’ plans to invade Upper Canada from Upstate New York along the St. Lawrence River was received. This would have severed access from Montreal, Quebec, to Kingston, Ontario. To ensure safe passage for military vessels between the two cities, a 125 -mile canal route was planned. Construction of the canal took six years. As many as 1,000 men died building the canal, mostly from malaria. In the end, the United States never took military action, and the canal became a well-used shipping lane. Today, the canal is mainly used in the summer by boaters sailing between rivers. In the winter, Ottawa maintains a 4.8-mile stretch of the canal in the downtown area for skating, where you can see the Parliament Building (the Canadian equivalent of the White House).
We left on Friday after school and crossed the border into Canada. The trip from Lake Placid to Ottawa is quick. It takes about 2 hours and 45 minutes, and the drive is about 138 miles from school to my house. Our plans looked a bit precarious when we saw the weather forecast. A massive storm system was moving up the US, and Ottawa was supposed to be one of the coldest places on earth that weekend. Our plan to skate the full length of the canal was not looking promising. The temperatures were projected to be about -22 degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of -34 degrees.
So, we bundled up on Saturday night with the guys borrowing neck gaiters to cover their faces and warmer gloves and headed down to skate the canal. “It was pretty cold, my neck warmer froze, and my eyelashes froze over,” Kevin Betsch ’26 said.
We were not sure how long we could skate in the freezing cold, but once we got out there and the canal was lit up, we decided to skate the whole length back and forth and covered 9.6 miles. “I thought it was gorgeous; the lights and the parts of downtown we got to see were amazing. It was an experience I will never forget,” Devin Smith ’26 said.
Near the end of our skate, we stopped for an Ottawa delicacy, a Beavertail: fried dough that is stretched into the shape of a beaver’s tail and topped with cinnamon and sugar, or maple spread. “They were really good. I really liked the maple on it; it was a lot different than the fake stuff we get here,” Betsch said. It was so cold we stopped to sit in a warming hut to eat our Beavertails so our hands didn’t freeze.
This was a fun weekend to share with some of my teammates, so they could experience a bit of Canada and see some of the special things Ottawa has to offer. It was an experience they will never forget.
