Lake Simcoe Kempenfelt Bay Ice Data

Lake Simcoe is a large lake at 744 square km. This ice record is from the west end of Kempenfelt Bay at the City of Barrie. Lake Simcoe had a robust ice harvesting business until the early years of the twentieth century and it has long hosted a large ice fishing community, although this has shrunk in the twenty-first century. The first part of the ice record was assembled in the early or mid-twentieth century by accessing the published ice-on and ice-off dates from reports in local newspapers, back to the mid-nineteenth century. Thereafter, it was added to year-by-year by local citizens under the leadership of Bob Sarjeant in the latter part of the twentieth century and then Alex Mills in the twenty-first century. During this period, the population of the City of Barrie, and hence the city itself, has grown steadily: about 16,000 in 1950 to about 150,000 in 2020.