With fireworks, a fire circus and the ice palace grand lighting, Saturday night's Polar Fest kickoff in Detroit Lakes was an overwhelming success, drawing thousands of visitors to the City Park, Pavilion and City Beach
After a 24-hour, blizzard-related delay, the Grand Lighting of the MN Sn'Ice Palace took place Saturday, Feb. 12, with planning committee members including Hans Gilsdorf, Scott Walz, Becky Mitchell, and Ken and Helen Foltz speaking alongside Detroit Lakes Vice Mayor Ron Zeman, who urged the crowd to come back and enjoy all the remaining Polar Fest events.
Gilsdorf — the ice palace's principal designer — talked about how the unofficial name of their MN Sn'Ice planning group was the "Ignorant Optimists Club," because they took on this project five years ago with little idea of how huge an undertaking it would be.
It was the Foltzes who were credited with conceiving the idea for an ice palace in Detroit Lakes; originally, the city was supposed to be the supplier of 30,000 blocks of ice for a super-sized ice palace that was to be the centerpiece of the St. Paul Winter Carnival in 2018. When they were informed in November of 2017 that the St. Paul palace wasn't going to happen, Ken Foltz said, rather than letting it go, the planning committee's response was, "We'll do our own!"
And so the first Detroit Lakes Ice Palace was built in 2018; five years later, to cap off Detroit Lakes' 150th birthday festivities, the decision was made to double the size of the original ice palace, harvesting roughly 2,000 blocks of ice, each weighing about 600 pounds.
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That project was completed early last week, with volunteers working hard to put the finishing touches in place in time for the grand lighting and Frozen Fireworks display on Saturday. About an hour prior to the grand lighting, the City Park Bandshell was surrounded by hundreds of spectators, who came early for the first performance of the Fandazzi Fire Circus that evening. A smaller, but still enthusiastic crowd stayed around after the fireworks for the late show by Fandazzi.
The Twin Cities-based performers juggled, danced around and otherwise manipulated fire for about half an hour late Saturday night, periodically asking the crowd, "What do you want?" — to which they inevitably replied with the group's catch phrase, "More fire!"
The performers obliged, right up until the finale — where they literally breathed flames up into the air.
Detroit Lakes' Polar Fest celebration continues through Sunday, Feb. 27. A complete schedule of events is available at polarfestdl.com , as well as inside a special printed section all about Polar Fest, called The Ice Breaker, available at the city Pavilion.
