By Emily Stonehouse

“We’re ready.”

Two words from Tanya McCready, the owner of Winterdance Dogsled Tours in Haliburton. 

An optimistic sentiment from a tourism provider who was quite literally stuck in the slush last year. 

“We’ve got our first tour booked for this weekend, which is a week earlier than planned,” said McCready, hopeful for the season ahead. 

But it wasn’t always rainbows and snowflakes for the dogsled provider. As a company that is entirely dependent on the weather to make or break their year, McCready and her business partner/husband, Hank, have toyed with the idea of making their own snow for quite some time. 

“We’ve been looking into a snowmaker for over 20 years,” she said. “The conversation comes up every year that we have a bad winter, and after last year, we realized that we couldn’t afford not to have one.” 

McCready said that they began doing a deep dive into the world of snow making five years ago, and it took them over two years to decide it was worth the investment. After doing their due diligence with research, they found a company based out of Quebec, who offered a product that would be large enough to service the entirety of the property around Winterdance. 

The unit works when it is connected to a large water pump, and chills the liquid as it passes through. “It’s not actually little snowflakes,” McCready noted, “they’re more like man-made snow pellets.” 

While the process may seem easy, the snowmaker does require a specific temperature and humidity in order to successfully make the flakes. While the maker won’t replace Mother Nature, McCready hopes that they can stockpile mounds of snow to access when needed. A whole new meaning to the term “snow banks”. “We want to lay down a base like they do at ski hills,” she said, “and then we would use that snow to patch areas around the trails.” 

The dogsledding company welcomes over 2000 guests each winter, and McCready noted that this year already, they have guests booked in from Germany, France, Kazakhstan, England, and the U.S. “It’s pretty cool,” she chuckled, sharing that they have a large world map hung up each year, with guests encouraged to pinpoint where they are from; resulting in a wealth of pins literally across the board. 

With the dire weather last year, Winterdance saw less than half of their regular numbers. “We have to be able to sustain winters here,” McCready said. “And yes, we have seen bad winters in the past. These anomalies have happened, but they seem to be happening more frequently.” 

Upon receipt of the snowmaker, Winterdance received a call from a film production company, eager to try the unit out. “The first time we fired up the snowmaker was to try to help out the movie set at Camp Kandalore, with the working title of Mysterium,” she shared. “The temperature and humidity didn’t cooperate, so we weren’t able to make them snow, but it was cool that was the first place we fired it up, and then Mother Nature gave them all that they needed.”

The snowmaker is now settled back at Winterdance, ready for the winter ahead. “We’re ready for a good season,” said McCready, “we’re ready to go.”