Welcome to Wayback Wednesday sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab! Every week, we’ll be sharing a vintage photo and asking our readers to chime in with anything you can recall about the photo, other related memories, or even a funny caption. Have some vintage photos of your own? Send them to [email protected] and we may share them with our readers!
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In this week’s photo, you won’t see this winter sport on Muskoka’s lakes these days. Do you know what event this was and where it was held? (Photo courtesy of Ryan Kidd)
Wayback Wednesday is sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab
At the end of December we shared this photo with you:
We couldn’t fool you with this one.
Debi Davis on Facebook said, “Is that the SkiTrain/Snow Train? I believe it came from Toronto to Huntsville.”
Marg Wood commented, “This could be The Ski Train- from Toronto to Huntsville – to stay and ski at Limberlost for the weekend. I remember my parents, Isabel & Andy Kellock, telling us about it and they would join the group at Limberlost. Could be Circa 1930’s!”
Brian Tapley concurred: “Sure looks like a train so I concur with Marg Wood. There is not a cell phone or iPod in sight so the 30s sounds about right. Also, even though these folks are woefully “out of touch” with society by not having a smart phone and lacking a GPS co-ordinate one has to notice that they all seem happy!”
It is indeed the ski train. This is what Susan Pryke’s Huntsville: With Spirit and Resolve tells us about it:
The Board of Trade and the (Huntsville) ski club set to work on a promotion campaign with the cooperation of the Canadian National Railway, which had agreed to run “cent a mile” ski trains to Huntsville for the winter season.
In mid-January 1933, Huntsville hosted its first winter carnival…A special ski train, with reduced fares, whisked the skiers north. The townsfolk met the visitors at the station and led them by a torchlight parade to the town hall. Here they registered for events and sorted out their lodgings. But few of them went to bed. They returned to the town hall auditorium for a jamboree and danced until 3 a.m. Then followed two days of skiing excursions, slalom races at Stevens Hill (near the main highway south of town), and other festivities, including an energetic “moccasin dance” on the ice at the arena.
Huntsville repeated the performance in following years, and eventually held three winter carnivals a season.
By the late 1930s, the CNR ran six ski trains a season, with cut-rate fares subsidized by the towns of Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, and Huntsville. Huntsville’s Sunday Ski events had become so popular that religious leaders began to worry that the Sabbath was not being kept properly. In March 1941 the heads of the Protestant churches took their complaint to the provincial legislature where they tabled a petition against Sunday ski trains.
Dice on Ice and it looks like Mary Lake but it was held on several lakes over the years. Once it was even held at our place (Bondi Resort on Haystack Bay of Lake of Bays) and I can just barely remember this one.
This was in a time when cars were fun, Carbon tax did not exist and we blissfully had no awareness of the damage we might be causing.
Tooling around on an ice covered lake in an old car was the coolest thing a teen could do in the 60’s. One would be amazed at the maneuvers that one could accomplish doing this and I’ll leave the details to your imagination.
Dice on Ice it is! Hard to imagine that in 1957 we parked V-8s with huge tail fins in a row on Mary Lake ice. Would we dare do that today? Do you believe in climate change???
Definitely Mary Lake. Recognize Crown Island on the right.
This looks like the Dice on Ice on Mary Lake, Port Sydney. It was exciting car racing that drew racers from all over Ontario. It ran there a few years then moved to Rotary Beach. Lastly it was at Penn Lake, Hidden Valley. Late 1950’s and into the 1960’s were the years for it.