When Super Bowl LII lands in Minneapolis next February, an enchanted winter wonderland made of massive blocks of ice will rise to the east, tempting visitors to cross the Mississippi River and venture over to Vadnais Heights.
Wait a second — Vadnais Heights? Shouldn’t that be St. Paul?
Well, it looks as if the correct answer is both.
That’s right — an “expertly designed ice palace” featuring an ice maze, ice sculpture, snow football and “amazing light shows” will help inaugurate Vadnais Heights’ new “Northern Lights and Ice Festival” from Jan. 25 to Feb. 5, according to a written statement from Mayor Bob Fletcher.
Despite months of efforts by St. Paul civic leaders to organize a massive ice palace during next year’s St. Paul Winter Carnival, Fletcher announced Monday that his city has already planned one to coincide with the Super Bowl. Together with the Vadnais Heights Economic Development Corp., they’ve chosen the architect, the light show company and different themes for each day. Two volunteer recruitment events are scheduled Tuesday.
“The current plan for it is to be 52 feet high in honor of the 52nd Super Bowl, but we’re certainly going to explore making it somewhat higher — a lot of it depends on ice conditions, and weather,” Fletcher said of the palace, which will rise on vacant land just northeast of the intersection of Interstate 35E and County Road E.
Rosanne Bump, president and CEO of the St. Paul Festival and Heritage Foundation, said Monday that she had not seen Fletcher’s written release about the Vadnais Heights ice palace, but she was confident of one thing: His will be smaller. Much smaller.
The foundation, which oversees the St. Paul Winter Carnival, is still about a month away from announcing the dates, location and other details related to its own ice palace, the city’s first in 14 years. She’s thinking that with a little luck, it could break the world record of 166 feet in height, achieved in 1992 at St. Paul’s Harriet Island.
“We’re trying to go even a little bit bigger than that, so we’ll see,” Bump said. “We are in the process of raising funds. … We’re working on it, and we’re feeling good about where we are right now. We certainly have further to go.”
Her foundation has received funding for the 2018 palace from Explore Minnesota (the state’s office of tourism), the city of St. Paul and private partners. Over its history, the St. Paul Winter Carnival has brought 36 ice palaces to St. Paul, the first in 1886. The city has not hosted an ice palace since 2004.
FLETCHER’S ICE HISTORY
Fletcher said his team has set its sights on ice from two lakes in the north metro, or possibly farther north.
“We’re only talking about 4,000 or 5,000 blocks of ice, and they’re (the Winter Carnival) talking about 20,000 blocks,” Fletcher said.
“Our goal is to make this a family-friendly event that focuses on the character traits of Minnesota,” he added. “There will be a lot of people from the southern United States coming up here who have never ridden a Polaris snowmobile or never been involved in ice fishing.”
Fletcher, a former Ramsey County sheriff who was elected mayor of Vadnais Heights in November, has plenty of personal ties to ice palace lore, and contacts that date back a generation or two. His father, Robert Fletcher Sr., a former dam designer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was the project engineer for the 1986 centennial ice castle that greeted scores of families by Lake Phalen.
“At Phalen we built a wonderful structure, something that hadn’t been done for many, many years,” said Tom Keller, who served as general contractor on the centennial project and worked closely at the time with the senior Fletcher and fellow organizer Charlie Hall.
