Flying Canöe Volant Festival Celebrates 13 Years of Winter Magic
By Marisa Finley and Kristina Felker
On a cold Friday evening in February, as temperatures dipped below, Edmontonians poured into Mill Creek Ravine to enjoy the annual Flying Canöe Volant Winter Festival. Bundled like arctic explorers, their faces glowing under layers of scarves and smartphone screens.
Flying Canoë Volant, a popular winter spectacle, now in its 13th year, lit up Edmonton's French Quarter and leaned into the city’s cultural fusion — Francophone, Indigenous, Métis —weaving them into something luminous, loud, and defiantly alive. Despite the chill, Mill Creek Ravine buzzed with the warmth of community spirit.
“Lucky 13 this year,” Daniel Cournoyer says, half-grinning. Cournoyer is the Executive Director of La Cité Francophone and the festival's creator, having nurtured the festival from a neighborhood event into a sprawling, neon-drenched, four-night urban pilgrimage and transforms Mill Creek Ravine into a dazzling, interactive experience. Somewhere between 100,000 people shuffle through the event, though it still feels like stumbling onto a secret—if your secret involves LED-lit canoes, trilingual storytelling, and maple syrup hardened into candy on a stick.
The festival's name originates from La Chasse-Galerie, an old French-Canadian legend about homesick voyageurs who make a deal with the devil to fly their canoe home for New Year’s Eve. “Like any good oral tradition, you never tell the story exactly the same way twice,” Cournoyer explains, which is both an ethos and an operational strategy. Instead of the Ottawa River, the canoe now soars over the North Saskatchewan River, and instead of whispered campfire ghost stories, we get charming light installations by Edmonton artist Dylan Toymaker, whose lanterns turn the snow-blanketed ravine into something Narnian/illuminous against the backdrop of the city.
The festival sprawls—from La Cité Francophone, with cabaret performances, to Rutherford Elementary, with domes that pulse with music, and lead down into the ravine, where the snow reflects the occasional drumbeat of a round dance or the sharp crack of a fire.
Performing for the first time at the Flying Canöe Volant, French-Canadian artist Geneviève Freinet, known by her stage name as Flora Luna, captivated the crowd with her bilingual, lush alternative pop music. A nod to her nocturnal songwriting habits, Freinet's performance had the audience in euphoria. With evident passion, she explains the importance of sharing her music with the Edmonton community “what is important to me when I'm on stage is the connection with people, with the audience, and to share emotions together, to convey some stories or some messages that people can relate to, and just giving that chance to the audience to have a night out and to have some fun, to live through emotions.”
Talia Smith (on the right) in Flying Canöe fashion dressed as a voyageur volunteer, Edmonton February 2025
Down in the ravine, Talia Smith, a volunteer dressed as a voyageur, floated through the crowd like a character in an avant-garde winter play. “My favorite part is interacting with everyone… and the tire,” she says, referring to the sticky maple syrup poured onto snow and rolled into candy on a stick.”
Colby MacIntyre, a veteran festival-goer who’s been coming for four years, sums it up with the kind of on-brand Edmontonian earnestness: “It’s phenomenal. It's one of the best cultural festivals in Edmonton. A lot of the community comes together to make it happen, and every year it gets better.”
The Flying Canöe Volant isn’t just an event; it’s a temporary reordering of space and story, a place where folklore collides with LED lights, where strangers become temporary co-conspirators against the long, dark Edmonton winter. Whether you're there for the music, the art, the mythology, the interactive experiences or just to watch your breath crystallize under a sky stitched with stars, the festival serves as a vibrant reminder that winter can be as enchanting and alive as you make it.