A Terrace Bay man is showing his support for Canadian athletes.
SCHREIBER — A local artist is showing his Olympic pride in a big way, using a frozen lake as his canvas and snowshoes as his brush to create a massive tribute to Canadian athletes.
That’s according to Kim Asmussen, a local snowshoe artist who created a 385 ft by 200 ft Canadian Olympic snowshoe design.
“People get hyped up pretty good about the Winter Olympics, I thought it would be a nice touch for it,” he said.
Asmussen started his snowshoe art career during the COVID-19 lockdowns after being inspired by a similar artist in Europe.
“I did my first one adorning a public school, actually. It was just an equilateral triangle broken up into other equilateral triangles, and I thought it was pretty cool, but, on hindsight, it wasn’t really that good,” he said.
Last year, Asmussen created the Canadian flag with the Centennial logo and the 150-year logo, he said he knew he had to create something for the winter Olympics.
“I thought it was an appropriate thing to get the Canadian maple leaf in there,” he said.
Asmussen shared a drone video of the artwork set to the national anthem and said the online reaction was overwhelmingly positive.
“It’s the sort of ups the amp on their pride,” he said.
A lifelong love for winter sports inspired Asmussen to create the piece.
“My main sport was skiing when I was a kid,” he said.
“I’ve always been attracted to the Olympics and the rings sort of have a nice touch to them when you’re trying to overlap them,” he said. “That was a bit of a challenge to get that right.”
Asmussen used a CAD program and had measurements drafted for the art design before he began packing snow, he said.
“Usually, I have a tighter pack with my snow shoes, but I was tight on the time because it was a really sunny day,” he said.
Asmussen started creating the design at 3:30 p.m. and only had until approximately 5 p.m., he said.
“I was skimping on my path, but the pattern looked pretty good just doing that,” he said.
Asmussen did not finish the design until the next day, he said.
“It was supposed to be cloudy, and I had my drone sitting in my van ready to go as soon as that sun sort of peeked through,” he said.
Asmussen flew the drone over Rongie Lake and took some photos and videos of it.
“You need the sun,” he said. “If it’s flat light, you don’t even see it.”
“The day before I had taken a picture of it, I couldn’t even see it.”
The entire process takes him about five hours, he said.
“That one probably took me two hours to lay it out, and then it was three hours to pack it,” he said.
The largest challenge isn’t the design, Asmussen said, it’s the unpredictable weather.
“I have to pull out here, more because of the weather. You are not guaranteed two days of sunshine here too often,” he said.
Anyone who wants to try snowshoe art for the first time should start off in a clear, sunny area with evenly divided sections, he said.
“You’ll see a lot of my snowshoe arts based upon circles, and then I divide the circle up into certain segments and go from there,” he said. “A lot of it’s patterning.”
Asmussen has plans to create another 20 designs, he said.
“Sometimes the season ends, one year was March third I think it ended, and other times I’m going into April,” he said.
Asmussen said his main limitation is finding suitable locations, forcing him to rely on large, open areas like the local driving range and baseball field.