Figure Skating on a Frozen Mountain Lake: Katrina Lazzarotto in BC

A skater glides across black, glassy ice while snow-covered peaks rise all around and repeat themselves in the reflection. In early 2016 helicopter pilot and aerial filmmaker Bradley Friesen flew figure skater Katrina Lazzarotto to a frozen lake at about 5,000 feet in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, a place with no road and no trail, and filmed her skating where almost no one had skated before.

Katrina Lazzarotto skates a frozen mountain lake

Lazzarotto had not skated for four years, but she told Upworthy that the skills “all came back quickly” and that skating on the lake felt like being “on heaven”. She flew up on short notice once conditions were right. In the finished film the contrast between a single small figure and the huge mountain bowl gives the film its sense of scale.

The film spread quickly after Upworthy featured it in March 2016 under the title “No one had ever skated on this frozen mountain lake until now”.

Watch Bradley Friesen’s mountain-lake skating film on YouTube.

The Mystics: a lake you can only reach by air

The lake lies deep in the coastal mountains roughly 50 miles (80 km) north-east of Vancouver. It is one of a group of seven nearby lakes nicknamed “The Mystics”, and with no roads or trails, Friesen said it is seen only by mountain goats and by people who fly over it in small helicopters. The surrounding mountain rises about a mile high.

These are the Pacific Ranges, the southernmost part of the Coast Mountains, which stretch about 1,600 km (990 miles) from the Fraser River north to the Yukon. Moist Pacific air rising over the range drops some of the heaviest precipitation in North America on its western slopes, much of it as snow at altitude, and the peaks carry some of the largest temperate-latitude ice fields in the world. Whistler, the famous ski resort, sits in the same range.

Why snow-free mountain ice is so rare

That heavy snowfall is exactly why a skateable mountain lake is unusual. A high lake normally freezes and is then quickly buried under snow, leaving nothing to skate on. Clear ice needs a hard freeze followed by a spell of cold, dry weather before the next storm. Friesen called a frozen, snow-free lake at that height “about a once every ten years phenomenon”, yet he noted it had happened three years in a row, which he linked to climate change.

Black ice like this is newly formed, clear ice. It looks dark because light passes through it into the water below, which is why it mirrors the mountains so well.

Skating on natural ice

Wild-ice skating is a growing winter pursuit, and its rules are simple: go with local knowledge and measure the ice yourself. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ ice-safety guidance notes that about four inches (10 cm) of clear, newly formed ice may support one person on foot, while a foot or more of old, partly thawed ice may not. Thickness can change from a foot to an inch or two within a few steps, and ice is often weaker near inflowing streams, over currents and close to shore. Booming and cracking sounds usually reflect the ice expanding and contracting with temperature.

For more photography built around frozen water, explore Kristina Makeeva's Lake Baikal gallery, and for another artist working on a snowy canvas, meet Simon Beck and his enormous snow drawings.

Related reading

• Stevin Tuchiwsky’s Western Canada: Winter Lakes, Falls and Mountain Towns
• Canadian Winter Humour: Snowbanks, Cold-Weather Scenes and Everyday Life
• Waterton Lakes: Where Prairie Meets the Rocky Mountains
• Moraine Lake: The Valley of the Ten Peaks and Its Famous View
• Banff Avenue: Mountain Views at Street Level
• Haffner Creek: Paul Zizka’s Ice-Climbing Photographs
• Frozen Hairstyles at Takhini Hot Springs in Canada
• Peyto Lake in Banff: Turquoise Water, Mountain Views and Seasonal Change
• Azure Lake in Wells Gray Park, British Columbia

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