Round-the-year skating at Shimla rink soon

Pratibha Chauhan

Tribune News Service

Shimla, March 26

Reducing number of ice skating days each year due to climate change may no longer be a cause of worry as the only natural ice skating rink in the country is all set to go high-tech with underground refrigeration with the help of financial assistance under from the Union Tourism Ministry.

The cost of undertaking this exercise is about Rs 9 crore, which will enable round the year ice skating which presently is confined to winter months. The Union Tourism and Civil Aviation Ministry has agreed in principle to fund this project, which will make this big attraction for tourists in Shimla a 365 days affair. However, this will change the status of this rink from a completely natural to a semi-artificial rink even though it will still remain open.

The funding for the ice skating is part of the Rs 100-crore approved by Union Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation under its Savdesh Darshan project for Himachal. A rafting centre will be set up at Tattapani besides a full-fledged National Paragliding Institute at Bir in Baijnath area of Kangra.

However, not the entire skating rink but only part would have the underground chilling pipes, enabling skating throughout the year on this patch. Environmentalists attribute the declining number of skating sessions every year to rising pollution levels, haphazard construction activity and deforestation. Clear nights with very low temperatures below five degrees Celsius are mandatory to enable freezing of water in the rink.

The rink here happens to be Asia’s oldest natural ice skating rink, set in the year 1920. The credit for setting up the rink goes to an Irish military officer Blessington who during his stay discovered that a bucket left outside in the night froze. This gave him the idea of setting up a natural ice-skating rink.

The staff at the Ice Skating Club sprinkle water on the ground in winters so that it freezes due to the low temperatures but with the temperatures not being so low, the number of skating days this winter was a mere six.

The delayed session started on December 27, 2016 and ended abruptly on January 2 due to abnormally high temperatures. Unfortunately, the session could not be resumed after that as the temperatures were not low enough to allow freezing of water. Prior to this the lowest number of skating sessions was 12 in 1972.

Till the eighties, there would be more than 100 skating sessions every winter though the highest of 165 sessions were held on 1960-61. About four decades back, the session would start in November and continue right upto end of February but now the sessions have shrunk to very few, disappointing skating enthusiasts.