Great Skate #11 - Ramsden Park

A lot of outdoor rinks in Toronto close after the February 26 weekend. It adds a sense of urgency to the Great Skate Project. How many more skates can I squeeze in before the season ends?

Great Skate #11 took me to to the Ramdsen Park rink, next to the Rosedale subway station. I was skating solo, but had lots of company on the ice. A comment on the City Rinks site says this rink is "often excellent". I arrived soon after the Zamboni had cleaned the ice, and really noticed how hard and smooth the ice felt compared to the Orillia rinks of the previous weekend.

It's a double-pad rink, with a top-40 radio station playing over the loudspeaker. Both rinks were pretty busy. Young boys were practising their hockey skills on the pleasure skating side, while a large group of grownup boys played a fairly intense game of shinny next door. 

I enjoyed a half-hour skate, dodging the hockey demons. Four teenagers joined us, skating arm-in-arm. Then a clutch of small children, the adults accompanying them, and a guy practising his figure skating techniques added to mix. It was nice being part of such a diverse crowd, but I began to feel like it was taking too much energy to avoid getting clipped by another skater.

Leaving the rink, I checked my map of outdoor rinks that I got from the Toronto parks and rec website. The dot for the Rosedale Park rink seemed very close to the Ramsden Park dot, so I set off on foot to see if I could score two rinks in one day.

After a long trudge through the posh streets of Rosedale, I realized that my map was misleading and I was nowhere near Rosedale Park rink. Great Skate #12 would have to wait for another day.




Location: Ramsden Park, 1020 Yonge St & Ramsden Park Rd, Toronto, ON M4W 1P7, Canada

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