As I write these words, I am sitting at the edge of the parking lot overlooking Moonlight Beach. The sun is high in the sky, nearly noon, and I can see some of the beachgoers gradually inching their way towards any available shade to shield themselves from the rays, which are causing me to sweat profusely.
Children are splashing around in the water and more than a few teenagers can be seen showing off their water skills to their peers. The beach is packed, and I’m not surprised, since a recent poll here at Sudbury.com (“What's your favourite Greater Sudbury beach?”) has Moonlight edging out Bell Park Main Beach, 199-177 votes (as of this writing).
Mysterious holes
Although we can say that we all look back fondly on our times visiting Moonlight Beach, swimming does come with inherent risks related to water depth and the unknown of the ground beneath one’s feet. One comment stood out amongst all of the happy memories.
The comment that I am referring to was made by reader Curt Davlit, who asked the question, “Did serious sinkholes develop in the water at some point?”
Unfortunately, the answer is, yes.
During the summer of 1973, a young boy named Brent Sauve tragically drowned at Moonlight Beach, after falling into a five-foot hole. Three days after Brent drowned in what was the designated swimming area of the beach, the city had 40 tons of rock dumped into the hole where the accident occurred, to make sure that such a tragedy was never repeated.
Not long after, on Sept. 6 1973, CHNO’s news director Bill Pring paid a visit to Moonlight Beach for a story and found himself saving a young girl’s life from befalling the same fate (apparently, that day alone at least 15 youngsters were rescued from the area).
City Recreation Director Bob Klevens said officials were aware of a deep hole about 70 feet off shore at the beach. The story went that the hole never remained constant, and because of the current, the hazard would move from location to location.
Following the news story on CHNO, Pring also wrote about the incident.
“There is a stone cairn about 80 feet offshore at Moonlight Beach on Lake Ramsey. It juts out of the water as a monument to an eight-year-old boy who drowned there August 29th and proved in fact, that there was a treacherous hole there. His monument fills that hole.”
As early as July 2, 1973, the city recreation department had been warned about the hole. In fact, the department had been pleaded with, criticized and even threatened because of that five-foot-deep hole in an area that normally would have been three feet deep.
A coroner's jury heard a string of witnesses, many of them mothers who testified to having pulled their own children from the grips of the deadly hole.
Not only did these women complain to lifeguards at the beach, some of them phoned directly to the city’s Recreation Department. In each case, the lifeguard passed the complaint on to his immediate superior or the message to the department was duly recorded: from there no one knows where it went.
In any case, the inquest found the youngster had been swimming at Moonlight Beach after lifeguards were off duty. What it couldn’t answer was why the hole hadn’t been addressed prior to the tragedy.
Was the problem now solved? Well, the headline on the front page of the Northern Life just three short years later answered that question: “Moonlight Beach moonscape: Death Holes Challenge Engineers’ Ingenuity.”
After the drowning, the city closed the beach and authorized a study of the situation at a cost of $45,000. The results of the study were released in the fall of 1974, and indicated that the holes were the result of sub-surface pressure.
The solution that was devised was simple and would require digging up the bottom of the lake in the swimming area and replacing it with heavier material that would hold everything together. Unfortunately, city council of the day balked at the anticipated costs of that project, resulting in a cheaper solution that involved digging a trench in the lake to cut off the pressure and fill in the existing holes. Moonlight Beach was reopened for the summer of 1975.
Alas, in August of 1976, more holes appeared close to the originals. The engineering company hired to oversee the trenching project reported that methane was building up beneath the lake and bubbling through the soil at weak points — this was the source of the holes.
Once again, the city refused the suggestion that the beach should be dug up. Instead, any holes that appeared were to be dug out and refilled, and the beach was to be monitored for the next three years.
So, was the problem finally solved? Eleven years later, in 1987, the headline in the Northern Life read, “Moonlight beach closes because it has become a swimming hazard.”
That summer, Moonlight Beach was officially closed for the season a few weeks earlier than usual as it was deemed a safety hazard to swimmers. As Sudbury Chief Commissioner Bill Rice said at the time, “People can be walking along in three feet of water and then suddenly find themselves in six feet of water because of the unexpected potholes in the sandy bottom of the lake.”
Reader Steven Vallarsa wrote in with a memory (which he believed may have been faulty) of the city placing dump truck loads of sand on the ice one winter to fix the problem of the holes. It turns out that he was correct.
In 1987, it was reported that the city had been pouring truckloads of sand on the ice surface of Moonlight during the previous winters. This was done so that, as the ice melted in the springtime, the sand would fall to the bottom and fill up the holes.
Engineers were then dispatched to find a permanent solution to the problem. What they discovered was not what they had expected. It turns out that an underground river flowing from the Wahnapitae area, into Lake Ramsey, was the cause of the dangerous formation of holes in Moonlight Beach's lake bottom.
Apparently, "the river water flowing underground percolates," stated Jean McConnell, the city's manager of recreation facilities.
The engineer's recommendation was to dig a trench and fill it with gravel, which would create a channel for the underground water to flow away from the beach, and finally eliminate the holes once and for all.
Ironically enough, after all of this, it turns out that the holes themselves had been around since time immemorial. Documents left behind by William Ramsey, the surveyor of the lake which bears his name, were found to have noted the presence of those very same holes in his survey of 1879.
Reader memories
Now that we’ve solved the mystery of the mysterious holes at Moonlight Beach, it’s time for us to delve into your happy memories and those crazy days of summer from your youth.
As reader Andy Béland exclaimed in response to the previous article, “Moonlight Beach was the place to go growing up!!” While Melanie MacRae, who spent many hours swimming there in her youth referred to it as the “old stomping grounds, for sure.”
A few of our readers’ fondest summer memories was the trip to the beach itself. Gerry Prevost commented that Moonlight Beach was a “good place to go swimming … we would bike from Auger Avenue, in New Sudbury to go there … Great memories.”
Reader Dan Oeschler remembers those days as an endless back and forth to the lakeside. “We used to bike from the New Sudbury Shopping Center,” he wrote, “and then bike back for supper and then bike back again for the evening. Great beach …”
A couple of former Conistonians echoed this memory with their very own twist (for those who don’t know, the downhill drop of Bancroft Drive not 300 metres from Moonlight Beach Road would rival many ski hills when one is on a bicycle). Ken Hood recalls “growing up in Coniston it was our go to place in the summer, biking there and back. The plus was going downhill on the way home.”
Cathy Zinger concurred with Ken. “I was just telling my kids this on the weekend … always had to walk it up the hill and yes the ride down was awesome (probably dangerous too).“
Now, for those more adventurous souls out there, your memories may align more with reader Jeannette Harapiak’s, who wrote, “We even walked there from Coniston a couple times or so to enjoy a cooling swim then walked back home along the highway, got home all sweaty again!”
Avid reader of this column, Noreen Barbe, has both past and present memories of Moonlight Beach’s impact on the lives of youngsters.
First, she wrote about the days prior to the city development of the beach when youth practically lived at the beach. “I remember daily swims, the fries, the raft, a great beach … without lifeguards or adult supervision … what a swell place in the '50's. Walking there and back.” She then continued, “Today, my great-grandkids return from Moonlight Beach with their parents saying ‘Noni, you have the greatest Moonlight Beach … We can bike there, and it only takes five minutes in the car…”
Normand Doucet’s memories of Moonlight, like Noreen’s above, also predate the city’s development of the property. He wrote that his greatest “memory was (from) the late ’50s … the song most played at the entrance was ‘Bye Bye Love’ by the Everly Brothers, as you entered the beach.” For Normand, it “used to set the mood for the bathing pleasure.”He recalls that at the time, “the sand was hard packed and the bottom was wavy and there were sudden changes in depths.”
Doucet also shared a funny incident involving a picnic and the hundreds of seagulls that frequented the beach. As he wrote, “My dad loved his snack of celery as a side with the sandwiches … mom laid out the snack and behold a seagull dropped a bomb on dad's celery .... we had to throw it out … he was not impressed at the birds … seagulls never lost their notoriety after that with him.”
Bill Petryshyn (being a South End kid, as he wrote) remembers that when he did partake in visiting Moonlight that he “had a great time playing soccer and swimming with the New Sudbury gang I met in college.” He also recalls a time around 1980 where he was watching the trials and tribulations of another beachgoer out on the water.
As he remembers the situation, “There was a fellow trying the then-new-to-us sport of parasailing, but he didn't realize his parachute was tangled and his first few attempts ended when the boat started up and he was flung sideways. Once he got the cords in their proper order off he went.“
Reader Cynthia Mellaney stated in her reminiscences that she “can say it was the only beach I went to with my parents as a kid … We used to have a seasonal pass as in the ’70s and part of the ’80s you had to pay to access the parking lots.” And, not only does she have wonderful memories of visiting the beach, her family also has a close connection to the area via a different route.
“My grandfather helped plant many trees that are (unfortunately) long gone. (While) his friend own(ed) the house that was behind the canteen and bathroom area that was eventually used as storage by the city.”
A commenter at the Sudbury Then and Now Facebook group, Mike Bleskie, in reference to the summers of his youth during the 1990s, recalls that that was “peak enjoyment time for me, to go to Moonlight with my mom or my grandparents.” (Not to mention that was his first year attending nearby Camp Sudaca.)
Reader Pat Langlois commented that her family “use(d) to rent the cabins there when (they) were kids … always (having) a good time.” Then, later on, she “and (her) husband and a bunch from Minnow Lake would go dancing on Saturday nights on the patio at the Moonlight Beach restaurant … really good times” as well.
Another reader, Samuel Iorfida also “used to go dancing there and eat … it was an old place but we had a lot of fun there.”
A couple of our readers remember the good times with Moonlight Beach being the go-to place to wind down before calling it a day. For Suzanne Steed, it was a case of “after the bar parties in the 80s … saunas and Moonlight.” While for Marcel Trepanier, the tradition was that he and some of his co-workers “went there after the 4-12 shift for a swim and a couple of beers.”
A 1979 advertisement in the Northern Life touted the benefits of spending one’s summer at the Moonlight Beach Trailer Park (“Walking distance to beach and park. Good hiking area. Only 3 miles to the Downtown Shopping Area”) At that time, the park had space for 35 trailer or tent sites (20 with electrical and water hook up) and a fair share of our readers’ families enjoyed these facilities for the summer.
Leonne Bock reminisced that she “especially remember(s) the campground. (I) remember going there with my sister and her family in the late ’70s. (Also) my sister-in-law from Windsor would park her trailer there and then visit family in the Sudbury area.” While reader Perry Sarazin remembers that he “spent two summers back in 1980 & 81 at the campground.”
Unfortunately, he lamented, that he “wish(ed) they would have never closed it.” This was the same sentiment echoed by Bock who wrote that she didn’t “know why they closed this campground as there are very few campgrounds in this city,” adding that it “was later destroyed to build houses.”
Well dear readers, the sun is setting off in the distance behind the Superstack and the reddish hue of the sky is our signal to end our day at the beach, with hopes that our skin does not match its harsh tint. Thank you buoys and gulls for sharing your memories with us.
And before we go, let me leave you with my version of the traditional Irish blessing: “May the sun shine warm upon your face. And until we meet again. May the waves hit your feet and the sand be your seat.” See you here again in two weeks for another trip back through time.
Jason Marcon is a writer and history enthusiast in Greater Sudbury. He runs the Coniston Historical Group and the Sudbury Then and Now Facebook page. Memory Lane is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.