Winter traditions abound in Quebec City, but few are as thrilling as sliding on a wooden board down a hill of ice at 70 kilometres an hour.
For 140 years, visitors and locals have flocked up the hill on Dufferin Terrace towering 83 metres above the St. Lawrence River, climbed onto wooden toboggans without being tied to anything and flown down the hill on the toboggans.
“We get calls from people saying, ‘We want to make sure the slide is going to be open before booking our plane tickets,'” said Marc Duchesne, co-owner of Au 1884, the company that has managed the toboggan slide since 2014.
In those 11 years, though, Duchesne said he’s seen the number of days the slide can be open shrink due to climate change. Last year, the company had to close the slide for 32 out of its target 95 days of operation because of the weather, about a third of the season.
So the company is investing $400,000 to refrigerate the slide, thanks to financial help from Tourisme Québec for winter infrastructure.
Duchesne said the slide can close due to rain, snowstorms and strong winds — which are especially frequent in that part of the city. The refrigeration system will be similar to the one used for the past five years at the skating rink on the nearby Plaines d’Abraham.
“Technically, now, we’ll be able to slide even if there’s no snow,” Duchesne said.
The company wants to expand its season until the end of March and is hoping to open as early as American Thanksgiving, the last weekend of November.
“The Château Frontenac is at maximum capacity that weekend,” Duchesne said, adding that staff at the renown luxury hotel that stands next to the slide often recommend it to guests.
But most winter tourists in Quebec City need no recommendation for the slide; they probably already know about it. Eighty four per cent of the slide’s users are from outside the city and Duchesne reckons it’s most popular among Americans and Australians.
Just last week, someone was willing to pay $1,000 to use the slide even if it wasn’t open yet, he said.
Duchesne said he has only let someone use the slide outside of opening hours once, when a newlywed bride begged to be able to go down it in her wedding dress even though it was about -20 C outside.
“Those people insisted so much that we finally accepted,” he said.
The toboggan slide was created in 1884, nearly a decade before the Château Frontenac was built, by a seasonal worker who lived in Old Quebec named Patrick Fitzgerald, according to Duchesne.
Since then, the slide only stopped running once for a period between 1981 to 1991.
The toboggan slide opened for the season Friday. It’s unclear when work on the refrigeration system will begin.
