Beaver Lake

This guide to Beaver Lake on Mount Royal traces its origins as a nineteen thirty-eight excavation of a swamp, shaped by landscape architect Frederick Todd into a four-leafed-clover basin and named for a buried beaver dam. It follows the lake's long run as a favorite skating spot for Montrealers, back to a landscape plan Frederick Law Olmsted sketched decades earlier for the whole mountain park. The rink's final winter, in two thousand seventeen, opened only thirty-seven days before the city closed it for good.