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PHOTOGRAPH BY DESIGN PICS INC., ALAMY
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By George Stone, TRAVEL Executive Editor
“It was cold, quiet, and well after dark when Matthew Baxley glimpsed the slumbering fish directly beneath his feet. He was ice skating in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a Minnesota landscape of boreal forest and seemingly boundless lakes. Below him, black ice revealed an underwater world in crisp detail.”
That’s Jen Rose Smith, writing about how outdoor adventurers have been lacing up and skimming the surface of America’s frozen rivers and lakes. Wild skating may not be a new thing—the oldest known ice skates, made from animal bones, date to 1800 B.C.—but its fascinating resurgence has all the timeless qualities of a classic National Geographic tale.
As Smith reports, ice-skate artifacts from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Finland point to the ingenuity of ancient travelers who made skates an efficient tool for winter travel in frigid and waterlogged landscapes. In our pandemic winter, ice skating on unmaintained lakes and rivers became not just an alternative to skating indoors. “The sport has just exploded in popularity,” says Paxson Woelber, a wild skater in Anchorage, Alaska. (Pictured above, a woman sails along the ice near Alaska’s Sheridan Glacier.)
Our story glides across icy geographies, including Minnesota, Colorado, Alaska, and Vermont, where a 4.3-mile skate trail on Lake Morey ranks as the longest in the U.S. Along the way we meet people like Laura Kottlowski, an artfully agile Colorado skater who etches intricate, mandala-like patterns into the surface of the ice with the blades beneath her feet.
Even the joy of outdoor adventure can serve a higher environmental purpose. Smith introduces Robert McLeman, a professor of geography and environmental studies, who is a founder of RinkWatch, a citizen science initiative in which participants monitor their local wild-skating rinks to document the long-term effects of climate change.
“How climate change may affect backyard skating or outdoor skating—that’s something [outdoor enthusiasts] can actually relate to,” he says.
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