Skating rink at West Kelowna’s Bull Mountain washed away overnight

Don Journeay has been up at 5 a.m. most mornings for more than a month building a skating rink at Bull Mountain Adventure Park in West Kelowna.

It sometimes takes hours just to clear the snow before spending more hours flooding the rink.

Today, Dec. 29, he went out to find the rink basically gone after someone left a hose running on it overnight.

“It just breaks your heart when you look and somebody has taken it upon themselves to do that,” Journeay told iNFOnews.ca. “Whether they intentionally did it or whether they just didn’t have a clue, it hurts. It hurts. It would be good if people were a little more conscientious to people’s hard work but, obviously, that’s not the case.”

Journey started about three years ago trying to restore the old Crystal Mountain Ski Resort, renaming it Bull Mountain Adventure Park while trying to get some basic winter activities going, such as skating, tobogganing, cross country skiing and snowshoeing.

READ MORE: West Kelowna's Crystal Mountain to reopen this winter under new name, new management

This winter, he opened the gates so people could have a place to safely park off Glenrosa Road as they toboggan on his hill.

Yesterday, he was out cutting trails. When he got back, he didn’t notice that someone had put his hose on the rink and left it running.

It was only when he went out to sweep it off and flood it this morning that he saw that much of the six inches of ice had been washed away all the way to the mud beneath.

“I am so sick to my stomach and heart broken,” he posted on his Facebook page. “I have been working on that for weeks to have it ready for New Year’s Day. I am giving up. I truly cannot put the effort in anymore.”

The gate is going to be locked against visitors for the time being.

“There is so much work to do,” Journeay said. “I’m just busy all the time so it’s hard to police everything so you put a little bit of faith in people that they’re not going to cause damage."

Last year, there were a number of people who volunteered and helped out. That has eased to a trickle this winter so it’s really just him and Jenny Giesbrecht trying open up the mountain during a pandemic.

“We put so much money and time and effort to try to bring this back to the community and it seems like people totally disrespect that,” Journeay said. “They don’t understand we don’t have pockets stuffed full of money. We’re spending the last dollar that we have on this place.”

He’s not charging admission until the hill can be fully open. He’s just asking for donations, which don’t go far.

Despite his frustration and posting that he can’t carry on anymore, he’s really just given up on the rink.

He’ll regroup and keep working on the multitude of “moving parts” on the mountain.

“We’re just trying to do what we can up here,” he said. “To have a little tobogganing up here is great but ,if it’s to the point where you have to police every person that comes up because you never know what’s going to happen, it’s kind of a frightening thought.”

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