Curling At The Saranac Lake Winter Carnival

I left the ice castle (see yesterday's post) and walked down to Lake Flower, where the Lake Placid Curling Club was demonstrating their sport:

Curling is a sport from Medieval Scotland in which stones are slid down the ice toward a target:

I didn't know what they used in the real sport but on this day, they were doing the sliding with push brooms. I looked it up when I got home and read that brooms are specially made for the sport:

The stones were given one push with the broom, bristles up, and then the player ran ahead and brushed the surface of the ice ahead of the sliding stone, apparently hoping to make it slide more smoothly:


Curling hasn't caught on in much of the U.S., but I've read that it's popular in Canada and there is an Olympic Curling event:

There was a small crowd watching from the sidelines, where the biggest attraction was a Labrador Retriever who loved the snow so very much that she was rolling and burrowing in it with great joy:

Children got to try curling and it was fun to watch:

Everyone was having fun. The snow continued nonstop, but it wasn't snowing too hard and the wind was calm. Alas, the heavy snows, high winds and below zero temperatures were to arrive the following day:

One man had a clipboard and wrote things down from time to time. Was he keeping score? I never found out:

But I'd seen most everything around Lake Flower, so I walked back toward the road to find my parked car: