Winter event organizers forced to adapt or cancel events

Weather blows winter plunge ashore, while Linwood’s ice bocce canceled

Last year, The Forest Lake Rotary Club’s annual Winter Plunge event barely made it out on the ice for the thrilling and chilly fundraising event. It was the incredible amount of snow insulating the ice, making ice conditions tenuous until just the week before the plunge.

This year, the extraordinarily warm winter will force the transition of the event, set for Saturday, Feb. 17, to land due to unsafe lake ice conditions.

“With last year’s ice conditions, we had already kind of formed a contingency plan, so I guess with this year we get to execute it,” said Angie Comstock, Forest Lake Rotary Club’s executive secretary, with a laugh.

This atypical winter has managed to wreak similar havoc on seasonal events as last year, but is instead due to the cyclical climate pattern, El Niño, versus the record-breaking snowfall in 2022-2023.

Last year, the ice was deemed stable enough to host the plunge after a few weeks of uncertainty, but event organizers weren’t as lucky this year. Instead, plungers will jump into a pool in the municipal parking lot.

This year, there are 25 teams taking the icy leap to fundraise for the organization of their choice. In years prior, there were just under 20 teams who would participate.

“The Rotary is determined that it will happen one way or another. But we couldn’t make it happen without the cooperation of members of our community,” Comstock said.

With the move to land, the Forest Lake Fire Department will fill the pool with the coldest water it can early in the morning so there’s even more time for the water to chill.

“We told them the colder the better,” Comstock said. “… Some of what I’ve heard [from plungers] is it’s not so much that the water is cold. It’s when you get out and the air is cold, and it looks like we’re in line for some cooler temperatures that day.”

The Rotary had to transition to the pool method in 2017, when warm temperatures melted lake ice in early February before the plunge took place at the end of the month. That year, they didn’t have to buy a pool, since one of the members gifted their used one for plungers to take a dip.

“After that event was done, the pool was no good. I hear there were lots of plugging holes in it during the event that year,” Comstock said.

This year, the Rotary decided to order a pool a few weeks ago just in case lake ice wasn’t going to remain solid this year.

“You would be amazed at how cheap they are in the middle of February,” she said.

The decision to transition to a pool versus canceling altogether was an obvious solution again this year in order to support the overall goal of the event.

“Our event is the biggest fundraiser of the year for a lot of these nonprofits. They count on being able to participate in it and have that money go towards their cause,” Comstock said.

If the Rotary had to cancel the event in the future, it would honor all of the donations made to the organizations, “but it’s important to hold the event so you get the team spirit and the fun,” Comstock said.

The Rotary Plunge is one of the events that can transition to an alternative option. Other events like Linwood’s Ice Bocce, Kids Pro Ice Snowmobile Racing or an inaugural Forest Lake Ice Fishing Classic don’t have many alternate options.

“We have exhausted all of our plan B ideas, sadly. … We are only able to hold Ice Bocce on the lake,” said Amanda Anderson, a Linwood Lake Improvement Association Ice Bocce planner.

The team brainstormed on how to bring the event to land, but were unable to find an alternate option to still maintain the style of the event with ice lanes for players to push pucks down. Linwood’s Ice Bocce was also canceled last year due to unsafe lake ice conditions, and the future of the event is being discussed.

El Niño

Last year’s winter woes were the result of too much snowfall causing weak ice to form on lakes — a different situation than we are seeing this winter.

Senior climatologist at the Division of Ecological and Water Resources for the Minnesota DNR Kenny Blumenfeld has received more calls and had more conversations with many friends and relatives about the weather this winter.

“We tend to get stuck and think, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is going to be forever.’ But that’s not necessarily the case. … Right now it’s an extraordinary event and it would be highly unusual for an extraordinary event to turn into a regular every day, every year event,” Blumenfeld said.

The winter heat wave isn’t the result of climate change, but the earth cycle of El Niño that happens when the Pacific Ocean’s surface temperature increases and natural wind patterns carry warm temperatures across the United States.

“The ocean takes a long time to heat up and cool down. And there’s a lot of what we call ‘lag.’ It takes a long time for us to feel the effect. It can take weeks or months after El Niño forms for us to actually notice the difference in our weather,” Blumenfeld said.

El Niño cycles are graded based on how much warmer than normal a three-month period is, with the next three-month average being December, January and February.

So far this winter, the El Niño effects have been strong.

“In the Twin Cities right now, it’s 55 degrees today, which is an all-time record high for the date and one of the warmest January days we’ve ever recorded,” Blumenfeld said on Wednesday, Jan. 31. “And so it really is a heat wave.”

A moderate El Niño rating would be 1 degree Celsius warmer than normal, strong would be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer and very strong would be 2 degrees Celsius or higher than normal. Based on NOAA’s Oceanic Niño Index, this El Niño cycle entered strong territory after August, September and October, when average temperatures were 1.6 degrees Celsius above normal. Averages from November, December and January were 2 degrees Celsius above normal.

“While El Niño has produced one of the warmest winters on record so far, the El Niño in 1877-78 was even warmer than this one,” said Jeff Boyne, National Weather Service meteorologist. "In climate stations that have records that date back far, it produced the warmest December, February, and winter across the Midwest.”

More recently, the 2015-2016 El Niño was already stronger than the current one Minnesota is experiencing, since it surpassed the very strong criteria in August, September and October. It wasn’t until March, April and May of 2016 when it dropped back down to a weak El Niño.

“This El Niño is expected to weaken during the late spring and summer and then transition to La Niña,” Boyne said.

NOAA predicts the El Niño cycle will taper off around April back into the cooler cycle, La Niña, which the United States had been experiencing since 2020.