Kevin Pack is not having the easiest of days.
“A couple ice fishers were out here a few weeks ago,” he says, as he admires his handiwork. “They said the ice was 12 inches thick, 16 max. I have a 18 inch bar and there’s a shelf below where I can get to another four inches of ice. These saws weren’t meant to be as far underwater as this one is going…”
He’s trying to cut an 8X8 foot hole in Moose Lake. He’s barely hit 2X2. It didn’t help that he had to clear a foot or so of snow off the lake first. And his tractor is stuck up on the bank of the lake, so he’s having to get through the ice with his too-short chainsaw and a variety of hand tools.
What started as a silly comment has turned into an event.
Back during the heart of the Sled Town Show Down Finals, Pack made a promise. “Tumbler Ridge is trying to win the sledtown showdown against Flin Flon,” wrote Pack on Facebook, saying that he was afraid that the rumoured closure of the back country could devastate Tumbler Ridge. “The truth is that I could care less about T.R winning a trophy and bragging rights…The chance to get into a major magazine with our story could do nothing but help in our fight to stay alive and continue to be a place for people to come and enjoy the beauty of our backcountry.”
He says that he made a comment to someone that if Tumbler was still behind on the last day, someone should agree to do a polar bear swim if people could somehow get the votes up high enough for us to win.
Tumbler Ridge won the contest, and, says Pack, “Through discussions that someone ended up being me.”
The number of Polar Bear swimmers has grown to somewhere between half a dozen to ten. The number of swimmers is fluctuating (as courage comes and goes), and the purpose for the swim has shifted from a celebration of Tumbler Ridge’s victory to a fundraiser for the family of Joe Schmitt, who recently passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.
Pack plunges the saw into the lake, nearly submerging it. “If I had a longer bar,” he mutters. He takes an eight foot metal pole and tries to knock the hidden ice loose. When it finally breaks free after ten minutes of work, it breaches slowly, like a glass whale.
Pack is finally able to get his small tractor down onto the ice, a fellow swimmer helping to clear a path to the lake with the snowblower. Now the job becomes quicker and easier, and he is able to cut the ice, then use the bucket of the tractor to snap the ice free. The resulting chunk of ice is about four feet long, by one foot wide by two feet deep, and Pack uses an axe to cut the ice into smaller chunks.
A few hours later, the hole has been prepped for tomorrow’s Polar Bear Swim. If you want to go watch, the first toe goes in the water around about 1 pm.
