LAC LA BICHE – Volunteers with the Lac La Biche Ice Festival have been busy on the frozen surface of Lac La Biche Lake starting site preparation for the roads, racetracks, skating rinks, and concession areas that will be part of this year’s event, which goes from Feb. 28-March 2.
Ken Staples, the organizer of the Lac La Biche Ice Festival, formerly called the Winter Festival of Speed, said when preparing the festival site next to the lakeshore of Lac La Biche lake each year, the organizing committee has a blueprint in mind of what the layout of the area will look like.
“We have a pretty good sense of the space in between everything,” he told Lakeland This Week.
Site preparations get underway with volunteers marking out areas where the activities for the winter festival will be taking place. Work is also done on the main road, which is the main access point to get on the ice.
The road starts at the lakeshore and goes roughly a kilometre and a half to where the runway for the aircraft fly-in event is situated.
Volunteers using heavy snowcat machines do the initial pushing and moving of the snow. Once this is done, crews from Lac La Biche County use heavy equipment such as plough trucks or graders, depending on the thickness of the ice, to groom roads and areas down to the bare ice.
Snow that has accumulated on the lake has been an issue for organizers of the 2025 Ice Festival.
After sites are ploughed off, Staples explains that snowbanks have a huge amount of concentrated weight.
“So, then you get the snowcats up on the snowbanks to spread them, so that the weight is more distributed over the ice area,” he said.
While volunteers typically get to work on site preparation two weeks prior to the start of the popular festival, which has been running since 1984, some jobs, such as building skating rinks, must be done earlier.
Lake ice can be very rough, and a Lac La Biche County Zamboni is used to finish prepping the skating rink area.
Due to uncertain weather conditions, the car track for the ice races normally is not constructed until a week before the festival begins.
If the track is built too early and gets snowed in, it has to be done again.
“It’s kind of a game of chicken with mother nature,” Staples stated.
The process of building the racetrack involves festival volunteers going on the ice to mark out the raceway. They do a couple of passes with a machine and keep driving on and grooming until it is ready to be raced on.
For the past 14 years, Lac La Biche resident Dave Phillips has been helping with site preparation for the winter festival.
His duties include marking out the area and ensuring that other volunteers are following the set plan, as well as making sure equipment is fuelled up at the end of the day and ready to go again.
“I just keep it going,” he said.
Phillips enjoys working with the volunteers who donate their time and use of machinery to build the roads and other features on the ice of Lac La Biche. These volunteers, he said, are very willing to do whatever is asked of them.
“They’re a great bunch of guys.”
Phillips, who actively volunteers with many organizations around Lac La Biche, enjoys his time spent helping with the long-running winter festival.
“I just love it . . . I love doing things for people,” he said. “It’s part of my core values.”
