Ice Track Maintenance: A Daily Dance With Winter

Creating and preserving a skating track on natural ice is far more than clearing snow and hoping for cold weather. It’s a careful, often exhausting process — part planning, part science with a sprinkle of luck — and every day brings a new challenge. Here’s a look behind the scenes at what it takes to keep an ice track open on a lake 300km north of the Arctic Circle.

After heavy snowfall the snow blower is our best friend

The Importance of Maintenance

When it comes to natural ice, you can’t set a schedule. Sometimes the best time to work is in the middle of the night or before sunrise. Snowfalls, sudden temperature rise, or a layer of water under the snow can change the track from perfect to impossible in just a few hours.

At the start of the season, we wait until we have 16-18 cm of black ice — that’s strong enough to hold an ATV. After that, we test the ice all the time, because its strength can change quickly.

Testing the Ice Master, the smoothing "trailer"

We decide the shape and location of the track early in the season, but the ice always has the final say. Ice can freeze in so many different ways — smooth, bumpy, layered, slushy — and no two seasons behave the same.

One major challenge is the balance between snow and ice thickness. Snow may look fluffy, but it’s heavy. If the snow cover is thicker than half the ice underneath, the ice starts to sink. Water then rises through cracks and floods the surface. This is the worst-case scenario for maintenance because it creates deep slush which is extremely hard to remove.

The work itself is often done in freezing temperatures, in the dark, and sometimes while standing in icy water if the track floods. Add unpredictable weather and the occasional (or let's say systematic) equipment breakdown, and you get a pretty good picture of our daily challenges. Luckily, we have a solid team and a lineup of machines — ATVs, ploughs, a snow blower, and since last year an ice-smoothing "trailer", which we’re pretty excited about.

The Battle With Weather

Flooded track after a week of positive temperatures (February 2025)

If maintenance is the craft, weather is the unpredictable partner that refuses to follow the choreography.

One moment the ice is perfect: smooth, solid, singing with cold. The next, a warm spell, a blizzard, or a sudden freeze–thaw cycle threatens to undo days of work in a single afternoon. Both temperature and timing matter — warm air after fresh snowfall can be far worse than the snow itself.

Snow accumulation, wind, and small shifts in temperature all shape the surface differently. A few centimeters of snow can insulate the ice, slowing freezing, a pretty bad combo i nthebeginning of the winter season . Strong winds can carve patterns and ridge lines. And freeze–thaw cycles can turn yesterday’s perfect surface into today’s bumpy maze.

A fair amount of cracks and bumps are normal on natural ice, but monitoring them is essential. If a crack grows too quickly or becomes too deep, the solution is often to water the surface, letting a fresh layer of ice seal and even out the track. Our ice smoothing "trailer" helps maintain the right width and surface quality, but some days require a mix of creativity and brute force.

Every winter teaches something new. Every storm leaves its signature. And every day on the lake reminds us that maintaining a wild ice track is not about controlling nature — it’s about working with it, adapting to it, and respecting its power.