It seems to be off-season for many paddlers, so if your
favourite paddling lake is covered with 20 cm of ice, here is
a winter idea.
Ice sailors call their sport "hard-water sailing" so why not
"hard-water paddling" for human-powered vessels across
frozen lakes? Maybe I'm stretching the analogy a bit? :-)
I have recently discovered two vehicles for exploring frozen lakes.
Interestingly, they are both Swedish inventions:
. long-distance touring skates (långfärdsskridsko)
. kick-sled (sparkstötting, or just "spark" for short)
Until now, most of my ice adventures have been on the kick-sled,
since it requires less skill and handles rougher ice than skates.
My full description of kick-sled at:
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/dermott/ski/spark.html
My longest ice-tour has been 60km/day.
Here is a list of some photos of some of ice tours
in Nova Scotia and Alberta:
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/dermott/ski/sparkpics.html
Lately, I've been trying more skating, as my skating
technique improves and when the ice is smoother. The main advantages
of skates are the better portability (or "portage-ability" )
and their elegant simplicity.
According to my readings, tour-skating has become hugely
popular in central Sweden in the last decade. One count put
the number at 300,000. There are hundreds of skating clubs,
SSSK in Stockholm is the largest at 12,000 members. Club tours
average about 40 km/Day but some of the elite skate up to 200 km/day.
The skating clubs make extensive use of the Internet, digital cameras,
GPS/digital mapping. So there is lot of info about it on Internet. Of
course, it's mostly in Swedish :-)
The North American expert on tour-skating is Jamie Hess:
"http://www.nordicskating.org/"
Jamie also runs a mail-order skate store :
"http://www.nordicskater.com/"
Other articles in English:
Timo in Finland:
"http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/timonice.html"
LLK in Sweden:
"http://www.llk.se/english/index.htm"
SSSK in Sweden:
"http://www.sssk.se/english/index.htm"
Al's Ice Adventures, an Australian discovers Swedish Skating:
"http://xray.bmc.uu.se/~alasdair/sport/ice/SKATING/index.html"
Swedish skaters make good use of digital cameras and update
their on-line photo-albums after every tour. Here are
a few albums, (little or no Swedish required):
Maud's outdoor photo albums (kayak/skates):
"http://www.bahnhof.se/~robberts/"
A few other albums:
"http://www.llk.se/foto/index.htm"
"http://www.frilufts.se/stockholm/alliansen/album/index.htm"
It seems that the most popular summer activity of Swedish skaters
is kayaking, on the same areas that they skate in winter. Humorously,
they call summer "Den stora svarta vaken" (The big black hole in the
ice! )
--
David Dermott , Wolfville Ridge, Nova Scotia, Canada
email:
WWW pages: http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/dermott/