U.S. Pond Hockey Championships organizers hopeful ice conditions will improve on Lake Nokomis
MINNEAPOLIS — The organizers of a Twin Cities staple are hopeful the unseasonably warm winter hasn't put their event on thin ice.
Puck drop at the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships is scheduled for two weeks from Thursday. Currently, large portions of Lake Nokomis have no ice at all.
"What I'm feeling is a little bit of nerves and anxiety, obviously with it being two weeks away," said event commissioner Jim Dahline. "But I'm also a little bit optimistic as we've watched trends in next week's weather which is the most important week of the year for us."
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The event itself draws in hundreds of teams from around the world. Ideally, they'd be skating on at least 16 inches of ice, Dahline said. With the right conditions over the next two weeks, he's hopeful ice could form at up to an inch and a half each day – but that would take average temperatures in the single digits.
"It's pretty amazing at how fast ice can be created on a lake like Nokomis, which is one of the reasons why we actually have our event there," Dahline said. "It's shallow. It's relatively calm. It gets cold down there."
Dahline and other organizers will start building out the event structure on Jan 14-15. He says it's then they will measure ice depth at 30 points across the lake.
"What we want to do is get to good safe ice depth across the entirety of our campus," he said. "It's Minnesota. It's been weird this year, no doubt, but at the end of the day we're confident our event is going to go on."
