The cabin was sold to us as a summer-only place: it was a 10-minute boat ride from the marina. So we studied the maps and told ourselves we would find a way to get there in winter anyhow. Maybe we could ski to the cabin when Georgian Bay froze? But we didn’t count on the currents that kept the water moving and the ice from thickening. Or the fact that the winters themselves were getting milder and milder.
That first summer, we boated over to the waste transfer station to find a new home for two taxidermied fish. They had come with the cabin and were in excellent condition, but they offended the sensibilities of our vegetarian teenage daughters. A local handyman took them off our hands straight away. We told him we were new to the neighbourhood. Soon we were asking if he knew the best way to get to the cabin in winter. He told us about a man who lived by the mouth of the creek, where our little bay narrowed and the water fell steeply over a pile of boulders. The man lived off the land. He didn’t own a car. He had a long beard and even longer hair, and he depended on the kindness of others to bring him into town twice a year to get groceries. People said he was a good guitar player too. He didn’t like trespassers, but he kept a floating dock that joined his creek bank to the far shore—the same shore as our cabin. If we asked nicely, the handy- man said, he might give us permission to cross the makeshift bridge. At least one cottager on our side of the bay used it to walk across the water, but his family had been there for generations.
In August, we walked through the woods next to our property and eventually found the little bridge that spanned the creek. We crossed it and passed hedges of wild pink roses and falling-apart buildings and old trailers and boats. We nervously called out a greeting by the door of the half-boarded up house. A man appeared. We explained that we’d bought the log cabin on the opposite shore, a few cottages down. He brought a stool and a guitar out into the field and invited us to listen to an impromptu concert.
A few songs in, we asked him about the bridge. He said we could use it as long as it was there, but warned us it might not be there for much longer. People had been crossing the narrows for generations, but the makeshift bridge had never been officially written into the township books.
“Now someone’s complained,” he said. “They’re saying it blocks access to the waterfall at the mouth of the creek.” The township was threatening to fine him if he didn’t take it down.
If the ice on the bay had been more reliable through the winter, we might never have bothered with the bridge. But we knew that the ice cover had been shrinking for some time. There might only be a few weeks when the ice would be safe enough to cross.
Ice cover has dwindled significantly throughout the Great Lakes since scientists first began measuring it with satellites in 1973. While numbers vary significantly from year to year, the overall trend is clear: ice cover has decreased by about 5 per cent per decade. Last winter, it reached its lowest point ever, a tenth of the average maximum. Not only that, the number of days the lakes are frozen is also declining.
Shrinking ice cover on the Great Lakes reflects a wider trend in our cryosphere—the word that describes any part of the earth that is covered in ice and snow. The UN has declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, and from this year forward, March 21 will be observed as the World Day of Glaciers. The fact that the UN is working so hard to draw attention to glaciers, which are what we might call the most “charismatic” feature of the cryosphere, suggests just how precarious its future is.
We now know there is a very real possibility that winter as we’ve known it may disappear. The current retreat of the cryosphere is simply the continuation of a much longer human-driven retreat from the harsh realities of winter, which accelerated during the Industrial Revolution. Not only have greenhouse gases steadily increased in the atmosphere since that time, warming the planet and threatening the future of the cryosphere, the Industrial Revolution also made it possible for us to romanticize winter, as Adam Gopnik noted in the 2011 CBC Massey Lectures, which were all about the season. The invention of central heating gave us a comfort inside that allowed us to idealize the harsh realities outside. Winter became a time for recreation because we had the luxury of being in climate-controlled spaces—in homes and offices, of course, but also in the cars we drive and the planes we fly. Canadians now spend an average of 90 per cent of their time indoors, no matter the season.
Writer Sasha Chapman is shifting her expectations of winter cottaging, but there is still much to embrace
The winter route to the cabin varies
by month and by year. A deep-freeze means visitors can avoid using a canoe; instead, they walk along shore, often using a pulk to tow a weekend’s worth of gear and food.
Writer Sasha Chapman is shifting her expectations of winter cottaging, but there is still much to embrace
Writer Sasha Chapman is shifting her expectations of winter cottaging, but there is still much to embrace
Each fall, Sasha and her husband, Anton, stash a canoe along the shoreline of their neighbour’s property. When they arrive to use it in winter, it can take a bit of digging to free the boat from the ice and snow. Anton carries a lightweight, fold-up shovel specifically for the task.
Writer Sasha Chapman is shifting her expectations of winter cottaging, but there is still much to embrace
I grew up on another lake—Lake Simcoe, Ont.— watching cars and trucks drive the ice road from the mainland to Georgina Island. In winter, it was the only way to get to the island, which had been home to Chippewas ever since the government had displaced their ancestors from the mainland in the 19th century. People on Georgina kept two weeks of groceries in their pantries because they never knew when the ice road might fail. Once it did, they had to wait for the water to open up enough to go by boat. In recent years, the ice road has become even less dependable—even through the dead of winter—as winters warm.
My ancestors settled on the Lake Simcoe mainland in the 19th century with plans to profit from the ice by harvesting it from the lake. They kept large blocks of water frozen under a blanket of sawdust right into summer and delivered them to people’s homes. They were used to keep ice boxes cold in the days before mechanical refrigeration. My relatives had also done the same thing in Toronto, on Grenadier Pond in High Park, until people began to worry about the quality of the water there; as the city grew, so did the diseases that contaminated its waterways.
Long after our Lake Simcoe cottage was outfitted with a refrigerator, my family still referred to the little outbuilding across from the summer kitchen as “The Igloo.” I knew it as a small, dark building that was filled with all the things my father no longer needed but could not bear to part with: old notebooks, canvas canoe packs with leather straps that had gone stiff, books that were mottled with mildew. It was years before I learned why we called it The Igloo, and more years still before I began to understand the ways in which settlers appropriate Indigenous language. My father told me that when he was young, the building had stood empty, except for the ice the family kept there; he remembered stepping out of the hot summer sun to find himself nearly blind and shivering in the frigid air of the dark room, digging into the sawdust with a pickaxe to hack another piece off the massive ice block so the servants could keep the devilled eggs cold for tea time.
To his English grandmother—who lived with them—and the generations who still remembered a time when ice was something you only encountered in winter, having ice in the height of summer must have seemed like a miracle.
One of the consequences of the advent of widespread (and now mechanical) refrigeration has been an erasure of seasons: we can eat strawberries from Mexico and California in January instead of under the Strawberry Moon, which is what many of our First Nations neighbours traditionally call the full moon in June. Another consequence of refrigeration is the erasure of place. We eat foods that have been trucked and shipped and flown to us from anywhere in the world, and we eat these foods without giving this luxury a second thought. Most of us have no idea how they were harvested, or who did the harvesting, or the often-circuitous route they took to criss-cross the world before landing on our table.
We have gained convenience in the lengthening and modernizing of the global food chain and an unimagined abundance in our daily food choices, but this has come at a price—a price that goes beyond the obvious increase in our carbon footprint and the implications this increase has for climate change. In making nearly all foods available all the time, we have also forgotten our connection to time and place: we have forgotten when foods come into season and where they are grown. Moreover, the energy that is being expended to fuel this global food chain is, in a very real way, messing with the seasons themselves: the ice is disappearing from our lakes and the snowpacks are melting sooner.
I am quite sure this is half the appeal of cottaging. We hope to establish, or re-establish, a connection to place, to a piece of ancient land we now call ours, and in doing so, we also learn to reattune ourselves to the way the seasons move across the land. It’s certainly one of the reasons I love going up to our little cabin in winter, despite, or maybe partly because of, the adventure it entails. Each season on the land has its own character and requirements, and each one is so very different.
Writer Sasha Chapman is shifting her expectations of winter cottaging, but there is still much to embrace
The main cottage has two bedrooms and a sleeping loft, just big enough to fit the family. The bunkie isn’t used for sleeping in winter, though its recently installed eaves and rain barrel provide drinking water on winter visits. Sasha’s two daughters, Emma and Rowan make the hour-long hike from the marina to the creek with their pup, Frankie. Initially, they used a bridge to cross to the other side, but it was removed not long after the family bought their place, in March 2020.
Writer Sasha Chapman is shifting her expectations of winter cottaging, but there is still much to embrace
Writer Sasha Chapman is shifting her expectations of winter cottaging, but there is still much to embrace
The entire trek from car to cottage takes up to two hours, depending on how iced-in the canoe is. The girls are happy to take a more meandering route, when conditions allow.
Our first winter at the cabin, the snow was deeper and more treacherous than we expected. We hiked an hour down a snow-covered road and walked across the chain of floating docks to reach the far shore where the snow was thigh-deep. We soon learned to carry an array of gear. Where the snow was fresh and powdery, we needed gaiters and snowshoes, but, more often than not, the snow on the road resembled the hardpack of a glacier: compact, icy layers that had warmed and softened in the sun and hardened again at night.
“It gets pretty greasy,” said the man who installed our woodstove and introduced himself as Johnny Blaze. “Mark my words, you’ll slip once and then you’ll think twice about trying to get here in winter.”
We needed cleats. Not the little nubs we wore when we hiked through the city and were rendered useless when there was a thick layer of snow on top of the ice, but long metal claws that would drive deep into the hardpack beneath us. We also needed a clean source of water for drinking and washing dishes. Seasoned winter campers boil down snow in a series of pots, but if you’ve ever tried this yourself, you’ll know how labour intensive it is: 10 cups of snow yields one cup of water—if you’re lucky. This is not a lot, when you consider that the average Canadian uses 223 litres, or about a thousand cups, of water per day, and there were four of us—two adults, two teenagers—consuming water at the cabin. We got a hand auger to drill holes in the ice to harvest lake water. Just in case. But the cabin is quite far from the lake’s edge, and we knew it would be an ordeal to carry buckets of water up the steep, snow-covered hill. So we decided to set up a food-grade rain barrel under the corner of the roof and direct a downspout into it. An immersible heater kept the meltwater in the barrel just above freezing. We also stored four-litre bottles of drinking water in the cabin itself.
By the second winter, we had established a routine. We arrived at the cabin at midday, when the sun was still high. Then we set a fire in the woodstove, drank some steaming miso soup in insulated cups, and ate a quick sandwich before heading out into the forest behind us to explore the woods while the cabin warmed up. For the first few hundred metres, we could follow a neighbour’s snow machine tracks. After that we had to make our own path, bushwhacking across wet- lands that were far more difficult to navigate in summer, when the bugs are bad and the mud is soft and the creeping juniper almost impassable. More often than not, some form of water would stop us in our summer tracks. In winter, though, it was a different story: the ice and snow carried us easily over ponds and swamps and left us with a record of our route that made it easy to find our way home.
Two hours into the expedition, the cabin had warmed up by 10 degrees, and the drinking water we’d stored there was beginning to melt. A four-hour expedition was even better: by then, the temperature inside the cabin was 20 degrees warmer—warm enough to settle in by the fire for some tea and cookies and a read.
Then one day our winter spell was abruptly broken: we arrived at the creek bank to find the floating dock bridge was gone, the docks pulled off to one side. The township had finally ordered it dismantled. In its place was an old Grumman canoe pulled into the bushes. We asked its owner if we could use it to get to the other side, to fetch a canoe of our own.
We told ourselves the missing bridge would not stop us: after all, we were experienced paddlers. We’d run rivers in the Northwest Territories and spent weeks canoeing in Quetico and Killarney and Algonquin. We still double-bagged all our gear as a matter of course since you never do know when it’s going to get wet.
The first time we cross the creek by canoe in the middle of winter, we are extremely cautious. We have our two teenagers in tow and a 60-pound dog, not to mention a lot of gear. The water may not be frozen solid, but it’s still ice-cold. If someone falls into the creek, it will be a matter of minutes before they develop life-threatening hypothermia.
The crossing itself is quite easy, less than 10 metres. At the narrows, we are protected from wind and waves, and the current is not so strong. But it’s a challenge to get in and out of the canoe safely with the packs. The banks of the creek are too steep for our liking: they make the canoe unstable. So we drag the canoe further downstream, where the crossing is wider and less protected from wind and waves, but at least there is a proper boat landing that slopes gently towards the water. Its owners generously agree to let us keep our canoe there. Now there is just the problem of where to disembark on the other side.
Our shoreline is all rock, now covered in ice, and our summer dock has been disconnected from the shore so the ice won’t grind it up against the rocks. A neighbour on our side of the bay keeps their dock hooked up all winter; the currents there are strong enough to prevent much ice build-up. The dock itself can be very slippery, but we figure we can find a way to make it work.
Will you think I am crazy if I tell you that I actually prefer our winter cottage adventures to sitting on the dock in summer? The funny thing is, I hated the cold when I was younger. I hated the short days and the long nights that winter brought. I felt tired and cold and sleepy all the time. I couldn’t wait for winter to end.
Then, in 2016, I did a fellowship at a long-term research station in Alaska. Before heading up to the wilderness of the North Slope, I stopped to interview a few scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. One scientist told me she spent the school year there, teaching, and then from May to August—in what should have been her summer—she did field work in Antarctica, during the southern hemisphere’s winter months. Dividing her time between the two poles meant that she spent most of her year in eternal winter: in darkness and icy cold. That sounds horrible, I said. Don’t you miss the sun? She said she didn’t mind it much, actually. She explained that she made a point of going out every day when the sun was at its highest for even a short cross-country ski or a snowshoe. She did this no matter the weather or how busy her schedule was. It makes all the difference, she said, getting outside in the middle of the day, catching whatever glimpse you can of the winter sun. And it feels great to push yourself, she added, to battle the elements. You feel like a million dollars.
I was reminded of something an acquaintance of my parents used to say, standing at the top of a ski hill while the winter wind raged around him: “Don’t you feel sorry for all those people in Florida? They don’t know what they’re missing!”
That scientist in Fairbanks changed the way I thought about winter and the way I wanted to spend it. As a Canadian, I was destined to spend about a third of my life in cold weather. Did I really want to spend a third of my life waiting for a warmer season, or could I make the most of what the colder months had to offer? I decided it was time to get a proper down jacket, a warm woolen hat: as Scandinavians are fond of saying, there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.
The more time I have spent outside in winter—in the city and later, at the cabin, up north—the more I have fallen in love with it. It’s especially dear to me now because I know these winters will not last forever. One day, my knees will give out, and the pack will be too heavy for me to carry. One day, the climate may be too warm for snow to fall. So I will love the quiet solitude of the woods in winter as best as I can now: listening to the way the snow blankets everything and tamps down the sound. I will revel in the adventure that comes from making my own tracks. The sense of self-sufficiency in carrying everything I need, the pride and relief in finishing yet another successful creek crossing. The way the cold air sharpens my breath and reminds me that I am alive. And I will treasure the way life keeps keeping on, even through the coldest, darkest nights and the shortening of days: the otters that belly slide through the snowy woods from one frozen pond to another, the woodpeckers that tap tap tap in the leafless trees. The flash of a red cardinal and the white tail of a deer. The gorgeous ice patterns that form and reform on the rocky waterfalls, the snow crystals that glitter and creep over the fallen birch tree.
“Winter started as this thing we had to get through,” Adam Gopnik observed in his CBC Massey Lectures, and “it has ended as this time to hold on to.”
Frequent contributor Sasha Chapman wrote about mushroom foraging for our Sept/Oct ’23 issue, a story that earned her a National Magazine Award. She lives in Toronto.
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