VALENS CONSERVATION Area offers great winter fun for hearty campers. Families can rent a tent or trailer site at the park or visit just for the day to try their hands at ice fishing on Valens' lake.

Comfortable winter camping may seem like an oxymoron -- a contradiction in terms -- but staff at Valens Conservation Area, just north of Hamilton, try to offer a few comforts to the hardy souls who rent winter campsites in this 700-acre park on Valens Lake.

For $26.50 per night, you can rent a tent or trailer site with an electrical outlet that lets you run lights and a small electric heater -- you bring the heater. Some campers even bring electric blankets.

Close to your campsite is a heated washroom building with hot showers, flush toilets and laundry facilities.

On the lake, there's relatively comfortable ice fishing. You can rent a fishing hut with a propane heater that keeps you warm and also lets you cook hotdogs and make coffee.

Twenty minutes from downtown Hamilton and about 75 km from Toronto, Valens is one of seven parks and a hiking trail network operated by the Hamilton Region Conservation Authority.

A 80-hectare lake at Valens was created in the 1960s when the Conservation Authority built a dam on Spencer Creek to maintain summer flow and control spring floods at the downstream town of Dundas.

Originally the lake was stocked with large-mouth bass that have taken hold and now naturally reproduce to provide summer fishing. In winter, anglers catch northern pike, a few perch, bluegills and crappies that somehow got into the lake and have multiplied.

Bluegills and crappies are panfish, similar to sunfish, that are good to eat if you take the trouble to de-bone or fillet them.

Many kids and dads catch them just for fun and return them alive to the water.

Open seven days a week and offering groomed cross-country ski trails, Valens is a favourite spot for outdoor-minded families because it's not too distant for city dwellers and has milder weather than northern ice-fishing lakes and provincial parks.

Deputy superintendent Paul Karbusicky told me that on a January Saturday there'll be 200 or more adults and kids on the lake fishing through the ice.

The park's staff check the ice thickness for safety everyday.

Some fishers rent heated huts; some bring their own improvised plastic shelters. Most just bundle up warmly and stand with their backs to the wind.

To rent a heated hut, you pay $19 per person per day. You can buy fishing bait at the park. You bring your own rods, lines and hooks or buy them here.

Entrance fee to the park, including fishing on the lake, is $7.50 per vehicle. This includes all occupants, no matter how many.

The park is open seven days a week. When there's no staffer at the gate, you pay at machines that take credit cards or cash and give change.

For info, call 905-525-2183 or visit conservationhamilton.on.ca.