What do you do when you’ve got a pair of skates, a few hundred metres of frozen ditch and energy to burn? A group of adventurous friends in Thunder Bay, Ont., decided to create their own Red Bull Crashed Ice course, designed by Mother Nature.
The Red Bull Crashed Ice competition is an extreme ice skating race, similar to a snowboard or ski cross event. This year, the final leg of the competition was held in Ottawa.
Michael McKenzie took to the frozen track earlier this month and said despite the perceived danger he thought “it was worth the risk.”
Filmmaker and friend Damien Gilbert said McKenzie contacted him after seeing the half-kilometre of ice and decided to film his attempt at conquering the course before it melted.
“We just acted on it. I got in the back of a truck with a gimble and a camera and just followed along on the road,” said Gilbert.
Gilbert described McKenzie as an “outdoorsy” person from Iowa who loves adventure and adrenaline. When asked whether they were nervous that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, Gilbert said, “Did you see his hair though? I think that would’ve protected any fall!”
But before they started rolling, Gilbert made sure McKenzie traded his Minnesota Moose jersey to a vintage Thunder Bay Senators jersey, which Gilbert had purchased off the back of a young man at a hockey game.
McKenzie skated the course several times, which Gilbert said he “nailed every time.” The result was an exciting video but his skates paid the price for skating over rocks, weeds and debris.
This wasn’t the only road-skating video the friends shot. The deep freeze that hit Thunder Bay froze a ditch off of one of the city’s main roads, on which Gilbert filmed a friend playing hockey.
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