Getting Going

Hello and Season's Greetings!  If you have discovered Backyard Ice because it was recently mentioned in one of New Brunswick's newspapers, I'd like to send out a special welcome to you!  This little blog is almost two years old, and this is my 35th post about my experiences in "the roofless world of skating outdoors."  As of this writing, this blog has been visited over 1200 times by people in 10 countries.  Also, according to the statistics, my most popular article to date features (among other things) an old picture of my brother on a pond in Titusville (click here); one of my personal favourite posts featured an even older picture of my father and his three brothers on Shaw Lake.  I've also enjoyed writing about my experiences playing in the World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, which you can read about right here and also here.  I hope that you will take a look through my older posts.  And, if you would like to contribute an article about your own experiences building a rink or skating outdoors, I'd like for you to send a few pictures and an article to me at nb.backyardice@gmail.com.  I'd be happy to feature your patch of ice in a future article, just like I did when I featured a frozen pond in Johnville in this article from January 2011.

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Well, this year's edition of my backyard rink really got going today; I would have liked to start sooner, but work has been a beast lately.  Anyway, in the article prior to this one, I hinted that for this season I would be trying a different approach to establishing the base of my rink.  (In past years, I have always waited for a few inches of snow, then headed out with the garden hose and some winter rubber boots and splashed around in the slush for a few hours for a few days; the result was always a good solid base of ice - if the temperatures cooperated! - albeit a very rough one.)  This season I am trying a base made of heavy plastic sheeting.  One challenge this presented was that the plastic came in a roll that is 10 feet wide and 150 feet long; my rink is about 26 feet by 46 feet.  So, the afternoon of Christmas Eve found Susie and me cutting and taping it up...

This was definitely a job that had to be done indoors; I was struck by how big 26x46 appears when you see it inside, compared to how small it seems when you are outside!  Anyway, after the carnage of Christmas morning was over, I headed outside to put the tarp down, build the boards on top of them, fold up and staple the plastic to the back of the boards, and start the water.  Regarding board-building, about halfway through the job I had to switch from drilling screws to hold the boards together to hammering nails - my cordless drill battery didn't like the minus 20 temperatures we had up here this morning!

Flooding with a plastic base is very different than flooding with an frozen slush base.  I only had to move the hose around once in a while, which gave me some time to bring in some more firewood and make a few minor repairs to the rink's lighting system.  Flooding, fixing lights, and topping up the firewood - that's multitasking, backyard ice style!

Hmm...

Some guys in Chicago were issued citations for using water from a fire hydrant to flood their backyard rink; you can read the article by clicking here.  They started off with a garden hose to flood nearly 4000 square feet of rink; I'm sure that this was taking much too long, so they decided to borrow 250 feet of fire hose from a firefighter relative and switched to the hydrant.  Great idea, but wouldn't the firefighter have known that it is illegal to use a hydrant & fire hose for anything other than putting out fires?  I think the word "borrowed" should have had quotation marks around it in that article!

Back here at my rink, I hope to write an article soon about the rink-building strategy that I will be trying for the first time this season.  Here is a hint...

BYI in NYC

This post is about skating in Central Park in New York City.  Despite the fact that Central Park has ice rinks in the wintertime, I am not actually talking about ice skating; yes, I know that this blog is called Backyard Ice.  However, the tagline of this blog is "the roofless world of skating outdoors" and I will comfortably place this article under the "skating outdoors" category!

I was in Central Park for the first time last year, when I was a chaperone for my oldest daughter Rebecca's high school trip to NYC.  My first reaction upon seeing the nice paved paths all over the place was, "man, I wish I had my inline skates."  So, when I was told by the powers that be around here that our family vacation this summer was going to be a trip to Manhattan, I said "fine, as long as I can go for a skate in Central Park."  So, I packed an extra bag with skates and helmets for my son Joey and myself.

Our hotel was on 8th Avenue, just a few blocks south of Central Park.  So, early on our last full day in NYC Joey and I headed out towards Columbus Circle, along with Backyard Ice's top photographer, Susie.  It was fairly early in the morning, and already the temperature was about 28°C with the heat index pushing 40°C.  (Check out this web page; it's a look at the weather on the actual day we went skating.)  Yeah, we managed to visit New York in the middle of a huge heat wave; in fact, on the very next day the temperature of 40°C set a new NYC record - the heat index was up somewhere above 46°C.  That was the day we left New York, and boy did our van's air conditioning get a workout all the way to Maine!

Unfortunately, Joey and I didn't have a whole lot of time to explore the park that morning...we were all going to an early Mets game, and we wanted to give ourselves lots of time to figure out how to get there on the subway.  (Sarcastic side note: it was just a bit hot underground at the subway station, and at the ballpark too!)  Also, even though we only went for a short skate, I was in desperate need of another shower.  Well, actually, I needed "another shower" almost as soon we stepped outside our hotel every day that we were there...

Here are a couple of action pictures I took of Joey wheeling through the park: 

Central Park is an amazing place.  You really can forget that you are smack dab in the middle of one of the world's biggest cities...until you peek up over the tall trees and see the huge buildings all around the outside of the park.  Oh, and on a day like July 21, 2011, a couple of Canadians who are used to considerably cooler summertime weather are pretty happy to find out that Central Park also has lots of water fountains...

Summertime On The Rink

I guess one of the cons of having a successful skating season is that there really isn't very much to blog about.  The first year that I wrote this blog was horrible for skating on the rink, which meant that I could write about wishing to go for a skate on the backyard rink, or at least complain about the conditions.  Last year, the blog's second, was a great one for the rink, but no so great for blog material.  See, I wasn't going to just write stuff like "today we went for a skate on the rink," or "today we scraped snow off the ice and skated on the rink."  So, here we are, three months after my last article and almost as long since all the ice has melted away...

The above photo was taken on April 23, which was the day that the ice left the brook behind the house for good.  Last year, as I wrote in this blog article, the ice left for good on April 6.  I wish I had made a note of when the ice left in 2008; it was probably sometime in June...what a winter that was!

So, it is now summertime, which means that our backyard rink becomes a small soccer field and a campground.  Also, this year, on Canada Day, my family wanted to have a little fire in the backyard to roast some marshmallows.  This was a great opportunity for me to shovel off some sod from a high spot that gave me a bit of grief last winter and place it on a low (and gravelly) spot that gave me almost as much grief.  I dragged some rocks over the bank from the brook's "beach" and made a little fire pit.  We were back out there again last night, and Joe thought it would be hilarious to keep the little fire pit there in the winter so we could skate around and roast marshmallows at the same time.  Also, while we were out there last night, a firefly was flying around us.  I mention that because I can't remember the last time I saw one of them, and it might have been the first time the kids saw one.

It's a lot easier to work on the ground base of the rink in the summer, so I will probably level off a few more high and low spots and toss some grass seed around before things start to freeze up.  Also, there are some strong rumours around the house that we will be building a new deck this summer.  I'm hoping to sneak some new boards for the rink into those plans...as you might be able to see in the top photo of this article, the old boards are looking a little beat-up.

There really is no "off-season" for a humble little backyard rink!

4045 Words

Here are four pictures that summarize the evolution of my rink this past winter:

There was quite a gap between the first and second pictures, and (unfortunately) not so much between the second and fourth.  Still, it was a good season for the Brook Garden!

March 9: A History

Once in a while I will go through a collection of pictures of my backyard rink looking for ideas for blog articles.  Around this time last year, I came across a picture from March 9, 2008 that showed what might be the biggest snow drift ever recorded at that particular location of our property.  It inspired a blog post where I discussed the extreme difference in weather conditions between 2008 and 2010.  Also in that article, I promised to let you know what the view is like from this vantage point in 2011.  So, here it is:

March 9: 2008, 2010, 2011

Understatement: I'd say 2011 is closer to the average conditions that either 2008 or 2010 were.  We have had a fair chunk of snow this year, however.  I've mentioned before that the prevailing winds in my backyard blow from the northeast to the southwest; and, it is almost always windy, which results in no snow at the northeast corner of the rink and tons of snow at the southwest corner.  Here is a picture taken from the northeast corner, looking across the rink:

This picture was taken last Friday, before my family and I went to Saint John for a swim meet.  The forecast at the time was calling for some pretty high temperatures on the weekend, along with some rain.  I took this picture because I figured the drift behind the house would be at its peak for this winter.  As it happened, the mercury hit plus 4 degrees on Saturday and plus 8 degrees on Sunday; Environment Canada says we got 12 mm of rain on Sunday, followed by about 43 cm of snow.  After I cleared the driveway - how did I live without a snowblower for so many years? - I took a look at the rink.  Under all that snow was quite a bit of slush, so it was time to make a decision regarding the future of this year's rink.

I could have salvaged the rink for another couple of days, but it would have required an immense effort to remove the snow and slush.  A number of floods would have then been required to get the ice smooth enough for skating.  And, all of this would have had to have been done in basically one day in order to squeeze one final skate on the rink - most likely today.  Now, I would have done all this if the demand was there, but I wasn't being pressured to do so.  Things might be different next year; we will see.

The low temperature tonight is only minus 1, and it looks like pretty high temperatures for the next several days, probably hitting plus double-digit numbers.  With the way the snow and ice melts at this time of year, it looks like "that's all, folks."  Still, it was a pretty good year for the rink and we enjoyed some great skating time on it...well worth the many cold nights flooding and the wintery days blowing snow off the ice.

Status Report

As much as I enjoyed the Heritage Classic (hey, I didn't even dislike the Flames' off-white pants!), it's time to swing the topic of conversation back to my rink.  This is the time of year when you don't have to be an expert weather forecaster to know that, sadly, the end is near for this year's edition of the backyard rink.

Last Wednesday evening, February 16, Joey and I had a good skate on the rink.  While I scraped off some snow that we received in the previous days, Joe practiced his stickhandling by weaving through our boots.  He also lined up some pucks and worked on his shot.  When I finished shoveling, we practiced some passing and then we played some keep-away.  Joey had lots of fun with that last activity in particular, and when we were finished he looked up at me and asked if we could play it again the next day.  Based on the forecast, I had to say probably not.

Unfortunately, the forecast was correct...we got a full day of above-zero temperatures (topping out at almost plus 6) and more than a little sunshine.  High temperatures are bad enough, but the sun at this time of year is a real rink-killer.  So, when I got home from work on Thursday, the first thing I did was head out to the backyard to check out the damage.  We probably lost up to a few centimetres of ice, which means that a couple of the rink's high points were poking out, and so we didn't go for a skate on the very soft ice.

On Friday we got a decent little snow storm (school was cancelled in the afternoon), and we received what seemed to be at least a few centimetres of snow every day until today.  It has also been very windy, and occasionally sunny, so I haven't cleared the snow off the rink - this is prime melting weather.  For example, the patches of bare asphalt on the driveway, once they catch some sun, really melt the nearby snow.  This melting principle also applies to the rink.

The forecast is sunny for the next few days.  Also, the forecast for this Thursday is a high of plus 1, so I will leave the snow there until at least then.  Right now they are calling for a bit more snow on Friday, with a high of plus 3.  (These temperatures are from Environment Canada; the Weather Network is calling for highs of minus 1, but with sunshine that kind of weather is still hard on the ice.)  Both forecasts say that the next few days after Friday look cold-ish.  So, if everything goes well, I'll clear the snow off at some point and either go for a skate (watch out for the bare patches!) or give it a flood.  If everything goes really well, we might get another skate out there...and maybe some more smiles like this one:

Big-Time Outdoor Hockey

About a month ago, when I first mentioned that I might write about the Calgary Flames' outdoor game, I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect.  At the time, they had been in 14th place in the conference for a very long time and it looked like the game would be meaningless.  However, thanks to an incredible run, the Flames are back in playoff contention and the points up for grabs in the Heritage Classic were big ones for both teams.

These outdoor games have become a nice gimmick for the NHL, and the TV networks get to do nice montages showing kids playing on ponds and such.  I'm sure that no-one is complaining about the merchandise profits and beer sales either.  And, as I said in my previous article, it also gives me a chance to write a little bit about the NHL and stay within the context of this blog.

There were some great scenes, especially whenever you could see the big open sky above the playing surface, or see the players' breath because of the cold; both are big elements that embody what playing hockey outdoors is all about.  Another one was no Zamboni!  Still, the best scene was ultimately Flames 4, Habs 0.  Check out NHL.com's video:



It makes things more enjoyable when the team you cheer for is playing well, but it wasn't that long ago when many Flames fans and hockey experts were calling for a complete dismantling of the team - including trading Jarome Iginla.  While I don't think this team will win the Stanley Cup this year - I hope I'm wrong! - I really do hope that Iggy gets to hoist the ol' mug someday.  He might have to do it the same way Ray Bourque did, and if he does eventually go to another team I will temporarily change my allegiance and cheer for that team.  Please please please don't let it be Montreal, however...that would be really tough to do.

Cold Hockey

On the other side of my computer screen as I start writing this, the second period of the Heritage Classic Alumni Game is streaming...and Lanny McDonald just scored on a penalty shot!  Anyway, this weekend in Calgary, with the games being played sans roof, gives me an opportunity to write about my favourite team and still stay within the context of my blog.  Those players sure look cold.  Been there, done that...only difference is that I played in front of a few less fans.


Good times.

I never really had a favourite NHL team until 1980, when I decided to become a fan of the team that had just relocated to Calgary.  My reasons for doing this were what you might expect from an 11-year old kid: I wanted to cheer for a team from a Canadian city, and the Leafs were too bad and the Canadiens were too good.  So, I've been a loyal fan of the Flames since then, through the good times and the bad times.



My favourite original Calgary Flame was Paul Reinhart; my favourite players on the 1989 team were Al MacInnis and Lanny, of course.  It was nice to see so many players from that team together again, even if they were freezing their way through the Alumni game.  And, I actually played outside against one of the players in that game...you can read all about that experience right here.



The day after...



Something I didn't mention in that article about playing in the pouring rain at the World Pond Hockey Championships against Brian Skrudland was that the next day, the temperatures dropped like crazy.  In fact, I checked Environment Canada's historical data: the day we played against Skrudland had a high of plus 12; the next morning, when we played our game, it was minus 12.  That's a temperature swing of 24 degrees in less than a day.  Oh, and it was windy of course, so we played with a wind chill of about minus 23.  Let me tell you, when that much water almost instantly freezes, great ice for skating is not the result.  As we played, we tried to avoid sections of the ice that had huge cracks and chunks that were chipped out.  Our game that morning was against a team of some fine hockey players from Newfoundland, who didn't seem to have as much trouble with the ice conditions as we did.  If you click on the picture to look at the larger version, you might get a sense of how not-great the ice was.  Apparently the cold weather in Calgary tonight also made for poor - and dangerous - ice.  Hopefully everything will be OK for tomorrow's game.

Finally, here is another picture from our cold game.  It looks like I'm scoring a goal against a guy who is playing with only one leg.  Fact is, he must have thought I was going to lift the puck...little did he know that I can't do that!

...Not Just For Skating

When I first moved to northern New Brunswick many winters ago, the guys I played hockey with told me about another game they like to play up here, called "boot hockey."  Now, a quick review of Google search results of the term give many different ways to play, but up here it is, of course, hockey played on a sheet of ice - without skates.  I didn't really play it until I got here, because when I was growing up in southern NB if we had a sheet of ice good enough to play hockey on, you can be darn sure we were going to put our skates on.  Anyway, one year they got me to play in an organized boot hockey tournament.  Some guys wore regular winter boots, some wore work boots, and some even wore sneakers.  After a weekend of running on ice, slipping, sliding, crashing and banging - and the occasional refreshment between games - I pretty much vowed never to play a boot hockey game again.  I don't hear too much about boot hockey any more, which is definitely a good thing as far as I am concerned.

Another thing you can do on the ice, as demonstrated here by Joey, is have some fun with the snow-removal aspects of outdoor rinks.  The prevailing winds blow from the northeast corner (behind Joe) to the southwest corner.  So, no matter how much snow we get, and if there is any breeze at all, the northeast corner of the ice has very little or no snow on it and the southwest corner can have several feet.  On this day, Joe kept busy clearing the shallow end while I went at the deep end with the snowblower.

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By the way, I recently finished reading Home Ice by Jack Falla.  Several blog posts ago, I mentioned that I would like to read this book sometime.  My very astute wife noted this and set to work looking for a copy of the out-of-print and hard-to-find book (published in 2000) as a Christmas gift for me.  She managed to find one through an online book store, and I am very glad she did.  What a wonderful book, as in it Mr. Falla recounts some great stories about skating outdoors in general, and particularly about his own backyard rink in Massachusetts.  Certainly, anyone who has ever built (or tried to build) their own patch of ice to skate on, or has ever skated on natural ice in the fresh air, will enjoy this book.  I'm not a book reviewer, so I'll just let this line from the foreword by Bobby Orr describe it: "It's a book about the heart and soul of hockey - a backyard rink, a frozen pond and the families and friends who play on them."  And, as Dickie Dunn might say, Jack Falla certainly "captured the spirit of the thing" in Home Ice - which is what I am always trying to do in this little blog.

BYI: Johnville

You might have heard about a little TV show called CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.  The popularity of the show resulted in two spinoffs, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY.  See what they did there for the names of the spinoffs?  Well, I'll be copying that naming logic.  So, here is the first spinoff of BYI: Backyard Ice...it is about a patch of ice in Carleton County, NB.  Welcome to BYI: Johnville!

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that my Uncle Joe had contacted me about rink-building.  I asked him to write a few words about his rink and send along some pictures (click on a picture to see a larger version).  He quickly obliged, so here are his words and a few of his pictures.  (Oh, welcome to the lucrative world of blogging, Joe; I'll send you 85% of the proceeds from this particular blog entry.  Now, where's my calculator...85% of $0.00 is...?)

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Having a good rink on the pond is a yearly challenge. Our pond raises and lowers itself on the water table. This is a good year, so far because there seems to be lots of water in the ground. Mother Nature freezes the pond for us. We flood the ice by cutting a hole in the pond and pump water onto the ice.  There are a few problems:

1. When the water table lowers, the air space under the ice causes the ice to settle creating cracks and making for uneven ice surfaces.  Flooding seals the cracks.

2. Because of all the rain we had, the pond was really high when it froze. It froze about 6 inches then 4 feet of water seeped out from under it causing the ice to settle. This creates problem number 3

3. Getting on and off the ice is not for the faint of heart. It is like going down a frozen slide and clawing your way back up.  The advantages are you hardly ever lose the puck or tennis ball and for the most part you are down out of the wind.

4. The 4th and worst problem with pond rinks: when the pond gets covered with a few tons of snow there is a tendency for water to squish out from under the ice, onto the top of the ice. Unless the snow is cleared quickly you are left with a slushy mess. I now have a smaller rink but still pretty good size.

Problem #5: goaltending.

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Great stuff, Joe.  I'll only take credit (blame?) for Problem #5, as captioned in the picture on the left.  It's nice to see that there is lots of fun being had in Johnville this winter!  As for here in Beresford, the "work-time to skate-time ratio" that I mentioned in my last article is getting much better.

I'm hoping to present another spinoff of BYI in the near future.  How does "BYI: Rothesay" sound, you Kanes down there?  Hint, hint...

Backyard Skating!

Things have been pretty busy lately, so unfortunately I've kind of neglected the ol' blog.  My last article was posted on January 5, which was only day 2 of the rink building process.  The weather has been cooperating this year, and I've been able to work on the rink just about every day.  Which brings us to this:

This picture of my son was taken on Saturday the 15th, and it was the first time anybody skated in our backyard for almost two years.  It's supposed to be pretty cold and not very windy tonight, so I'll be back out there giving it another flood.  In fact, the forecasted high temperatures are well below zero for at least the next couple of weeks, so this should be a great year for the rink.

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I got a note from my Uncle Joe yesterday...you remember him, he is the Uncle I made famous in this blog post.  He is also working on a patch of ice to skate on, as he has done for years, and he was wondering why we do what we do.  I think we carry the same gene that gets some people on their knees out in the dirt - and the heat and the flies - planting flowers.  Personally, I'll take a cold, crisp winter's night over a sticky hot summer day anytime.  As Joe said, "I feel good flooding the ice on a moonlit night when I'm freezing my butt off, even if no one ever skates on it."  Man, Joe, that's poetry.  As we both know, the work-time to skate-time ratio is always about 150:1 for most backyard rinks, but it really is time well spent.

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This blog isn't really the place to say this, but here I go anyway:  right now, I hate pro sports.  Explanation: my favourite NFL team is the New England Patriots, and my favourite NHL team is the Calgary Flames.  The Flames will be playing an outdoor game next month, so I'll probably write about that when the time comes.  Or not.  Ah, whatever.  I'm going outside now!

BYI's 1st B-Day

My first blog entry was on January 6, 2010, which makes this blog now one year old.  Quite honestly, there hasn't been much to blog about with regards to actual results in the construction of my rink, but I have enjoyed writing about other aspects of rink-building and skating outdoors.  Some highlights:

• I discussed my experiences competing in the World Pond Hockey Championships in Frozen Bodies (…of Water): Part II;
• I demonstrated the unbelievable differences in recent winters in March 9, 2008 Redux;
• here's a Father's Day post comparing the backyard rink to a garden [Gardens and Barns (and Happy Father’s Day!)];
• and, a recounting of some great stories told to me by my father and uncle about skating outdoors a long time ago can be found in Joe, Bob, Terry and Jim.

I'm really looking forward to year two of Backyard Ice, and I have many more stories for the blog bouncing around in my head.  However, I'm hoping that the next couple of months will be full of stories about our experiences skating in the backyard.  Oh, and speaking about that...

I've managed to get a decent start on my rink this year.  We had a green Christmas here in Beresford, and the first "big" snowfall we got after that melted away after a few days.  So, the only real work just started after we got a good bit of snow on Monday; on Tuesday night I spent some time splashing around in slush to work on the base.  It's now Wednesday, and I just came in from putting more water on the rink.  Its should be pretty cold for at least a few more days, so I'll be out there as often as I can puttin' the water to 'er.  Hopefully by the time a forecasted snow storm hits us on Saturday (20-30 cm, according to the Weather Network) my base will be built up and smooth enough to run the snowblower over it!