Almost no one tells you when you move to Minnesota to love the winter, to embrace the chilly temperatures, icy roadways and nearly skin-burning winds.
Of course, Minnesota has a reputation for cold, long, dark winter months that test even seasoned residents. Some of that means adapting — through building skyways to insulate downtown workers or adopting some version of the saying: “there is no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing” — which I’ve heard on more than a few occasions.
I grew up in Maine, and we faced a similar wintertime need to find things to keep us busy and stay outside. While the mix of activities was slightly different, the basic premise was the same.
Having lived here a while now, I’ve learned that finding ways to make the best of these winter months is core to Minnesota identity. I didn’t embrace the winter months during my years as a student at Macalester College, besides trips to the beloved Mac-Groveland skating rink.
This year I set out to change that.
Land of Sky Blue (Icy) Waters
I never truly appreciated Minnesota’s lakes as a four-season amenity, not just a place to cool off or fish on a warm summer day. It shouldn’t surprise me — given Minnesotans’ unwillingness to be fazed by polar climates or frigid windchills.
According to the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, Minneapolis has roughly 11 square miles of parkland and water throughout the city, spread across 185 park properties, 55 miles of parkways, 102 miles of Grand Rounds biking and walking paths, 22 lakes, 12 formal gardens, seven golf courses and 49 recreation centers. Throughout the warmer months, I and just about everyone else in Minneapolis spends a lot of time in the parks, which truly is a world-class park system, even if we technically lost the top spot in national rankings to Washington, D.C.
But during the winter, the park system’s land that is accessible to biking, walking and rolling expands significantly, with roughly 2 square miles of frozen lakes providing a whole new perspective on the parks and how to use them.
I certainly was apprehensive to wade onto the frozen lakes at first, given the signs dotting the shoreline that clearly declare “Ice Not Safe, Keep Off” — a wise cautionary measure from the common-sense premise that traversing a frozen lake is never without risk. The Park Board itself publishes a lot of helpful tips for safely interacting with frozen lakes.
But I was amazed by the creative uses of this new space — by artists, anglers and more — accounting for a roughly 20% increase in accessible land area across the park system.
Minneapolis’ flagship ice-bound event, the annual Art Shanty Projects, provided a great entry point for people to engage with the lakes along with a wide array of local artists, makers, musicians and other community members. Even with a short run due to the warm and relatively snowless 2024-25 winter, nearly 30,000 people attended this year’s icy art gallery.
Beyond the ice shanties nestled near the shore along the Lake Harriet Bandshell, I also saw ice anglers dotting the frozen lake. Growing up in Maine I have distant memories of ice fishing with my family, but due to climate change and rising temperatures, the equipment my dad bought when I was a kid has been sitting in our garage gathering dust for the better part of a decade.
Brace Yourself!
Embracing the winter this year, several friends and I set out to experience ice fishing. Given that all of us hail from beyond Minnesota, the experience was both novel and a core part of experiencing Minnesota’s winter culture.
Told that a hand-crank ice auger could cut through a foot of ice in around a minute — which we soon discovered was a gross underestimation — we set out to catch something through the 2-plus feet of ice on the Minneapolis lakes, mainly Lake Harriet and Lake of the Isles. Any seasoned ice fisher would have laughed us off the frozen lakes with our motley collection of lawn chairs, ragtag fishing equipment and choice of footwear, but the experience felt like an indoctrination into a classic Minnesota winter sport, even if it did yield only one small fish (a black crappie) over the entire winter.
People’s creative uses of the newfound park space fascinated me. I saw people walking, skiing, biking and skating on the lakes, of course. But I didn’t expect people to be skateboarding with makeshift ice skate/skateboard hybrids, ice surfing and riding on something that looks like a sailboat with skis (if there is some Minnesota name for this, please let me know).
Even opening new walking and biking routes that could enable shortcuts across a lake was a novelty.
I’m amazed by the joy that interacting with the frozen lakes brought me — and many other Minneapolis residents — this winter and the versatility of the activities that I witnessed and experienced there.
Surely, just as our wintertime exploration started, the ice began to crack, then shift and then recede, ending this icy exploration just in time for spring. But for me and our other group of Minnesota transplants, discovering a core part of the spirit that makes Minnesota and Minneapolis meaningful made the winter more meaningful, too.
All photos by Joe Harrington
Editor’s note: “Street Views” appears in Streets.mn twice monthly. Respond to columnist and board member Joe Harrington directly at [email protected]. You may also add comments at our Streets.mn pages on Bluesky and Facebook.