There is a specific kind of exhaustion known only to the ‘Rink Rat,’ the community volunteer who stands alone in the dark at 2 a.m. holding a fire hose while the rest of the neighbourhood sleeps.
The math of the flood is brutal. It takes a solid week of nightly maintenance to build a skateable base. We are talking four to eight hours of volunteer labour, every single night, battling fatigue and frozen fingers, just to coax a sheet of ice into existence. You do it because you remember the magic of the outdoor rink (ODR).
You do it for the sound of blades carving fresh ice and the sight of kids with rosy cheeks forgetting their screens as they drag sick dangles over the blue line. It’s a rare moment when you can see the Canadian dream breathing life into the next generation.
I spent seven years building my home barn, the Beddington Heights Community outdoor rink. I would proudly advertise it as the worst ice in Calgary, and every New Year’s Eve, I would toe-drag my way into the new year, teaching my kids the finer points of a top-corn-back-sauce-bar-downski. I brought in 2025 watching a torrential downpour dissolve muddy snowbanks.
The weather isn’t just fighting us; it’s running up the score. Despite the heroic efforts of Calgary community leaders, we can no longer run from a heartbreaking reality: climate change is stealing this tradition from future generations.
The data tells a story climate deniers can no longer spin. To maintain safe and hard ice, we need daily average temperatures of -7°C or lower. Any warmer, and you can’t maintain the zone. The sun eats ice from the top while ground heat attacks from below. Three of the last four winters produced fewer than 30 ‘skateable’ days.
Bring out the stretcher coach, this isn’t a stint on the IR, it’s an epitaph.
This isn’t a three-day respite from the cold
Winter 2023-2024 was a demoralizing disaster.
We saw less than 25 days where the temperature held that critical -7°C line.
Volunteers spent hundreds of hours dumping thousands of litres of water, only to watch it evaporate by the weekend. To the volunteers, that’s a four-game sweep in the first round. Even so-called good years are now fraught with anxiety! The 2022-2023 season teased us with a deep freeze in December, only to be gutted by a warm January that turned rinks into Slurpees.
Right now, in the winter of 2025-2026, only the most deluded of rink rats are still chirping about a comeback. The solid December build was reset by a January thaw, leaving rinks looking rougher than Don Cherry’s 2004 Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em videos. February daily highs are expected to be 15-25°C warmer than the -5°C average.
Time to dust off the clubs folks; how’s Fox Hollow looking?
We used to blame these interruptions on Chinooks, a Calgary charm. But this is different. This isn’t a three-day respite from the cold. This is the absence of winter. Sustained cold is going extinct, and the once reliable season is becoming a risky stretch pass to a rookie with concrete mitts.
The tragedy isn’t the loss of ice. It’s the burnout of the starting line-up. The grinders who put in the tough shifts to make it happen.
How many times can you ask a volunteer to work an eight-hour shift in the dark on Sunday, knowing the forecast predicts +5°C on Tuesday? The dedication of our community associations is top cheese, but the laws of thermodynamics remain undefeated. You cannot volunteer your way out of a climate change crisis.
It’s with a heavy heart that I accept it’s the end of the backyard rink. It’s time to hoist the community sheet into the rafters. Skating will move indoors to be scheduled, refrigerated, and sanitized. Too expensive for most, removed from the reach of the Calgary kid with nothing but rusty skates and a stick, looking to blow off steam.
Sure, I’ll miss stopping by the rink before work to rifle a few clappers off the iron, but I can get my kicks in late-night beer league.
The real victims are the kids who won’t know what it’s like to toss sticks in the middle of a pond and carve up a quick shinny after class.
That memory has melted into a warm February afternoon puddle.
Author Bio: Brady Adkins is a Project Manager at Triton Environmental Consultants and an Executive MBA candidate at the Haskayne School of Business. He has spent seven years volunteering as a rink builder for the Beddington Heights Community Association and is the co-organizer of the Sleddington Music & Arts Festival.
