By Conor Mihell
The history of nordic skiing in Sault Ste. Marie is long, colourful and defined by a profound sense of community. More than half a century ago, winter enthusiasts from the upstart Soo Finnish Ski Club blazed their own cross-country ski trails through the snowy woods and rugged hills of what’s now known as the Hiawatha Highlands, located just north of the city centre. Early skiers didn’t know the pleasure of machine-groomed trails. Frontrunners in the club’s recreational races not only set the pace, they also had the challenge of making tracks through the soft powder while keeping ahead of pursuing skiers. Such legendary beginnings kindled one of Ontario’s most vibrant cross-country ski scenes and blazed the way for the development of some of the province’s finest networks of trails.
Fast-forward to 2022, and local event organizer Lawrence Foster was looking to celebrate Sault Ste. Marie’s snowy winters and exceptional skiing terrain. He conceived the inaugural Beaver Freezer Marathon as a fun and adventurous recreational race to wrap up the season at the Hiawatha Highlands. Multiple race options catered to all levels of skiers, fat-bikers and trail-runners, including families, beginners and elite athletes alike, with distances of up to 42 km. Scheduled for mid-March, the event would link existing Hiawatha Highlands nordic ski and fat-bike trails with frozen lakes and wetlands, showcasing the rugged, snow-covered landscape. All proceeds from the volunteer-run event would go towards supporting future trail development to support Sault Ste. Marie’s ongoing efforts to become a hub of outdoor recreation.
“We wanted to make it fun and inclusive,” says Foster, a Sault College professor and former world-class adventure racer. “We had team options. You could race it as a relay or do it as a group. Your kid could ride or ski beside you in the relay. We wanted to have a community event with a friendly vibe, all supporting a good cause.”
First-year registrations far exceeded Foster’s expectations. Upwards of 300 competitors signed up for the event, the majority locals but also approximately 40 registrants from Sudbury, Toronto, Ottawa and Michigan. “It seemed like a great way to ski in places you wouldn’t get to experience otherwise,” says participant Paul Kyostia. “I was looking forward to skiing across the lakes with the benefit of packed trails in between.”
With Foster in charge of mapping a course, participants were sure to get a premium slice of Algoma backcountry. Starting and finishing at the Hiawatha Highlands headquarters at Kinsmen Park, the Beaver Freezer route wound through nearly a dozen frozen lakes and waterways, including Trout and Lower Island and Finn, just north of city limits. Groomers marked and packed the trails for easy skiing, cycling and running. Sault College was the inaugural event’s title sponsor and the college’s Natural Environment students volunteered to assist with race day details, including safety checkpoints and aid stations.
With abundant snowfall throughout the winter and perfect lake ice, the plan seemed bulletproof until a deluge of freezing rain forced Foster to postpone the Sunday race until the following weekend. Foster was deflated, but at the same time he knew that so many dedicated enthusiasts would do far more than salvage the event. Participants and volunteers shuffled their plans and held onto their enthusiasm, and with improved weather conditions Foster says the rescheduled race day was all he ever hoped for. “Countless people lined up to volunteer to make it a great event,” he notes. “I’ve received so many messages of support from people looking forward to next year’s Beaver Freezer. It feels good to be contributing to the momentum of trail development with the Kinsmen Club, the Sault Cycling Club, and Tourism Sault Ste. Marie.”
Foster admits that the weather always remains a wild card for late-winter events, but he’s hoping that scheduling the 2023 Beaver Freezer Marathon across an entire weekend will provide an adequate buffer for any surprises. “The biggest highlight has been the support of the community,” Foster says. But given the area’s deep and passionate roots for nordic sports, local support is a given. As word gets out, Foster anticipates a larger contingent of out-of-towners—with visitors arriving to experience the great trails and welcoming vibe of yet another shining example of why Sault Ste. Marie has always been Ontario’s winter sports capital.
The 2023 event will take place on Saturday, March 11th, with Sunday, March 12th being the backup day. All the information you’ll need including course details, timing and other info is available on the Beaver Freezer website.
Out of town guests will receive 10% off their stay at The Water Tower Inn. Details here.
By Sault Tourism
Sault Ste. Marie has just experienced a fantastic winter with plenty of snow meaning our ski hills and trails will be open well into April!
So come and enjoy Searchmont Resort, one of the biggest vertical downhill ski hills in Ontario, all the way through Easter! Or cross-country ski over 150km of incredible cross-country Skiing at Hiawatha Highlands and Stokely Creek Lodge. Visit on April 1st or 2nd and enjoy Hogan’s Homestead’s Maple Syrup Weekend! Or, weather and ice cover permitting, enjoy a one of a kind experience with an ice caves tour with Forest The Canoe.
Keep reading to help plan your Spring skiing and other things adventure!
Big vertical, rugged terrain, Searchmont Resort has some of the best downhill skiing in Ontario. And… new snowmaking equipment means more snow and staying open later in the year.
On top of the 703 feet of vertical, 26 runs, 100 acres of rolling mountain, terrain park, 4 lifts, snow school, Searchmont is also a fully equipped resort with a restaurant, bar, shop, ski and snowboard rentals and accommodations. Escape the crowds and the lift queues of jam-packed southern Ontario ski hills and get away to this stunning, adventure-packed mountain.
Sault Ste. Marie offers some of the best cross country skiing in North America. Stokely Creek Lodge has 100km of trails, groomed for both classic and skate skiing and spread over 12,000 spectacular acres of the Algoma Highlands.
Breathtaking scenery including frozen lakes and waterfalls, endless forests, and amazing vistas like the one at the top of King Mountain, make Stokely a bucket-list destination for nordic skiers. Enjoy Scandinavian lodging and stay warm in one of the six warming huts along the way; it’s an experience that will bring you back year after year.
Situated just 10 minutes from downtown, Hiawatha Highlands offers more than 50km of beautiful skiing in towering Pine forests. Click here for a link to all trail and maps or read more about all that Hiawatha Highlands has to offer!
On the weekend of April 1st and 2nd, Hogan’s Homestead, one of Ontario’s best maple syrup producers, hosts a Maple Weekend. The ‘Everything Maple Festival’ includes a local market, operational tours, food + drinks and maple activities. Stay tuned and visit their website here as more details become available!
Lake Superior’s phenomenal ice caves are a sight to behold. Enigmatic, unpredictable, subject to nature’s whims, but wholly worth it, these incredible structures will leave you speechless. They form in mid-winter when wavy conditions followed by a deep-freeze sculpts the rugged Lake Superior coastline into caves and chasms of blue ice.
Weather and ice-cover permitting, Forest The Canoe offers guided day trips to the best ice caves, including crampon-equipped snowshoes and a snack. We do recommend you use a local guide with experience of the conditions as walking on ice can be dangerous.
Steve Foster, from Sault Ste. Marie, is a certified, highly experienced, expert ice climber who will help you have the best possible adventure. His company, Steve Foster Adventure Instruction, offers half day experiences for all abilities, to enjoy these beautifully frozen ice structures.
Sault Ste. Marie has a new day loop for riders! The Soo Highlands Loop starts in the city and goes north to Searchmont and the surrounding area. Sledders can explore the natural beauty of Algoma Highlands, and its rugged landscapes just north of Sault Ste. Marie, in this 169 km loop.
For inspiration watch Cristy Lee enjoy her recent sledding experience in the Soo here!
Sault Ste. Marie is on its way to becoming an epicentre for Fat Biking, one of the fastest growing winter sports.
The Soo has perfectly groomed trails to the north of the city at Hiawatha Highlands and Crimson Ridge. Enjoy some challenging elevation in the beautiful Hiawatha forests as well as the picturesque trails at Crimson Ridge.
Downtown, the Sault Ste. Marie Canal National Historic Site has easy fatbike trails for use on St. Marys and Whitefish islands, adjacent to the St. Marys Rapids. In addition, the St. Kateri Outdoor Learning Centre has around 3.5 km of fat biking trails.
Sault Ste. Marie is hosting a variety of events all spring, from comedy acts to conservatory music and of course the dramatic conclusion to the Soo Greyhounds season.
Stay up to date with all the events via our Events page!
After a day in the snow and ice you’ll want to refuel and recharge, and we have some great restaurants serving some fantastic food to warm you right up!
From Syrian Shawarma to spicy Indian, delicious Italian or sizzling steak, the Sault has so many great restaurants.
For a ‘hot’ new tip check out Gino’s Fired Up, one of the latest new restaurants in town.
Getting to Sault Ste. Marie is easy with several flights from Air Canada, Bearskin and Porter a day from Toronto, Sudbury and Thunder Bay and rental cars waiting at the airport. And course you can drive on the Trans-Canada highway, which is well maintained all year.
No matter where you’re from, where you currently live, or where you visit, a sunset anywhere is beautiful, there’s no doubt about that. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, a fact we all know, but what might sometimes be easy to take for granted, is how lucky the residents and visitors of Sault Ste. Marie (and area) are to be able to witness this phenomenon so frequently. Throughout each of the four seasons, and especially over the big lake, we are truly fortunate and blessed to have such easy access and the ability to witness the colours of the rainbow throughout the entire sky, as the sun rises and sets all year-round.
I may be slightly biased, seeing as though the “big lake” is so close to where I live and grew up, but I think a lot of people who live and visit here would agree, a sunset over Lake Superior just hits different.
Sometime early in the pandemic, and after the loss of a loved-one who was dear and near to me, I started taking (almost) weekly drives “up north” on days when I thought I might get the chance to witness, enjoy, and capture something colourful (and potentially remarkable) on my camera to share with the people in my life who might not wander too far from town as often as I have been able to. It was enough of a brief and temporary escape from town each week when going much further wasn’t much of an option for me.
After months of putting on way too many miles on my leased vehicle, burning gas I could have conserved a little bit better, and taking hundreds of pictures just to post a few, a friend of mine asked me, “why drive all that way just for a sunset every week?” I sat and thought about it for a while, and a few things came to mind.
For one, why not? In a time that felt dark and uncertain for a lot of people, it made me (and most of the people I had the opportunity to share them with) happy, as the sun and the lake often do, and it was an escape from the city to some of my favourite places in the Algoma Highlands, and in a way, it made me feel closer to the people that I had lost; it was, essentially, my church.
Two, if you are from here, you know that our winters can be long most years and any chance to enjoy the sun can be enough to change your mood and day completely, even for those residents and visitors that love to play around in the snow and make the most of the colder seasons.
Finally, no two sunsets are alike, and it’s always beautiful to watch each day end differently, whether it was bursting with colour or a little gloomier on the cloudy days. At times, even when the weather was a little darker and greyer, or a storm was rolling in (or had just passed), those days still managed to put out some of the nicest sunsets that I have been able to capture on camera and witness with my naked eye; beautiful sunsets often favour cloudy skies and are brighter after a storm passes by.
What makes it different for those who live and visit any area in the northern part of Algoma and who stay close to the Lake Superior coastline, is how those sunsets appear over Lake Superior. If you’re lucky enough to catch one on a calm day, the mirror-effect from the lake in-front, above and below your eyes is bound to make any good or bad day end better, and although brief, they’re unforgettable moments.
We often stop and notice those aw-inspiring phenomenon like seeing millions of stars when you’re away from city lights, rainbows after a storm, the rare sight of the northern lights dancing in the sky, and depending on the kind of person that you are (the early birds), you might be more likely to catch sunrises, which can also be really beautiful but not entirely the same. We have a bad habit of becoming complacent to the things and opportunities we might see or have access to more often than the rest and sometimes we let those moments pass us by (or we pass them by), even unknowingly and unintentionally, but if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should take nothing for granted.
A sunset, is a thirty to sixty minute period of time where you can sit, watch, and take in the beauty of the ever-changing colours of the sky (that often become more brilliant after the sun sets below the western horizon), and be thankful that you had the opportunity to watch one more day come and go as well as having the opportunity to live (or visit) where you do, even if the summers are short and the winters can be long.
If you’ve never had the opportunity, or do not often go out of your way to take the short drive and adventure north to watch one, I highly recommend that you do, any chance that you get, whether it be alone or with friends and family you enjoy spending your time with. Over a decade or so ago, I met a (non-local) man who said something to me that I’ll never forget, he said “You’re lucky you live where you do. God put the mountains in the west, the oceans in the east, and put them both together right here in Northern Ontario, and you get to watch some of the most beautiful sunsets fall over all of it.”
Some of the best places to capture sunsets north of Sault Ste. Marie and against Lake Superior (within 30 minutes to 2.5 hours north): parts of Goulais River, Havilland Bay, Harmony Beach, Batchewana Bay (that face west), Sawpit Bay, Mamainse Harbour, Alona Bay, Montreal River Harbour, and the western-facing parts of the Coastal Trail in Lake Superior Provincial Park.
The timing of a sunset varies throughout the year; you can look up what time the sun will set on a weather app or by using a sun calculator app online. Please note, that the poles are slightly titled, meaning the sun tends to set close to the northwest in the midsummer, and the southwest in midwinter, the exact direction of the sunrise and sunset is determined by the latitude and the time of year.
Words and pictures provided by Alicia Smith at the Pen + Pixel CO.
