Milder temps put chill on river trail hopes

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This article was published 23/01/2024 (617 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Heather Hinam’s favourite thing about Winnipeg winters is the Nestaweya River Trail.

In past years, she would get up early to walk or skate the trail near-daily at The Forks. She’s even held social media contests ranking her favourite warming huts.

This year, the previous balmy weather, while enjoyable for some, has been a bit of a bummer for her. However, the recent cold snap brought hope the river ice could soon be ready for winter enthusiasts.

Watching the incoming warm forecast, that hope has quickly melted away.

“I was optimistic, but now I’m less optimistic,” Hinam, a naturalist with a PhD in conservation ecology, said Monday.

“I’m kind of resigning myself to the fact that I probably won’t get to enjoy it this year, at least not for very long, if it even makes it.”

The past few weeks have brought piles of snow and wind chills cracking -40 as The Forks monitored the river trail. However, the ice still wasn’t thick enough to be safe and it remains closed to the public.

While the weather is a factor, exacerbating the issue are higher water levels on the Red River caused by high precipitation in the United States, The Forks spokesperson Zachary Peters said.

“The crew has been hard at work on the Nestaweya River Trail. There have been many setbacks this year, including a mild start to winter and the increased water flow that came up from the States earlier this month,” he said in an email.

“As it is in past years, we will only open the trail when it is safe to do so, and we’ll open in a sequential manner, starting with the port rink. From there, sections along the Red and Assiniboine rivers will open, as nature allows.”

The latest opening date of the river trail had been Jan. 21, in 2016. The Forks closed it for an entire season only once in more than 20 years, when high water levels brought dangerous icy debris that was impossible to clear in 2020.

The iconic six-plus kilometre groomed trail draws hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, usually opening in the first half of January (only four openings in the past 16 years were in December).

Last year, the river trail opened Jan. 1, bringing in roughly 210,000 people from New Year’s Day to March 5, the highest count since 2019, when some 236,000 visited in the same time period.

Meantime, the Winnipeg 150 Winter Park at The Forks, which includes two rinks, the upper trails and skating path near the CN stage, is open.

With below-normal weather early in the month turning more seasonal, Winnipeg’s temperatures have averaged out to about normal for January.

The surface ridge causing the cold streak is about to pass, and climate event El Niño will next bring temperatures above seasonal norms.

The weather is expected to start warming up today and continue through the end of the month.

“If we were to just end January right now, it actually would be 0.2 degrees (C) above normal, so not really that far off,” said Justin Shelley, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. “Now, the last week of the month is going to skew that to be certainly warmer than that by the time all is said and done.”

While it’s impossible to say now if the weather will work in the river trail’s favour, the rest of the winter appears similarly warm.

“The anomalies look like they’re going to peak through the first half of the month. It’s possible that in the first week of February, we could be seeing temperatures between 10 and 15 degrees above normal, but even into the second week of February, temperatures might still be five to eight degrees above normal,” Shelley said.

“So certainly an extended warm-up is expected for not just Winnipeg but the entire province.”

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Hinam plans to keep watching and hoping the river trail will open before the end of the season.

She said it’s been “mind-blowing” to watch how many people frequent the trail in past years, but worries about the further impact of climate change.

“Growing up, it was a lot harder to find outdoor activities in the winter in Winnipeg, because everybody just kind of avoided winter, but now, at least in the last decade, we’ve done a really good job embracing winter and celebrating what we are,” she said.

“Unfortunately, we’re doing it as winter is starting to be threatened by us.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.