It’s not been a good rink year, folks. I started working on it over the Christmas holidays, and things were progressing nicely, but the last three weeks of mild temperatures and rain have really taken their toll. If things don’t get cold and stay cold soon we might be looking at a rink-less year at Nairn St. I see the temperatures for the next few days aren’t any heck, the highs are above 0. Sunday and Monday look a little better. We will see, if things don’t improve in the next week or so, I’m thinking the whole thing might just be a wash this year. What a drag.

With ice on my mind, I thought I would share with you the following site: The Alaskan Alpine Club in Fairbanks Alaska. These guys are mountain and ice climbers, and they have a web site. The parts I like best are the Ice Tower pages. They use pipes and a water pump to make ice towers in the winter that they then proceed to climb. The thing is, the towers are currently over 120 feet tall, hopefully solid ice. They climb the towers every few days to add more pipe to the top to keep ahead of the ice. So, basically I see these guys as fellow rink makers. Their rink is vertical, that’s all. And they are nuts. That’s the only differences.

They have the added benefit of absolutely bone-chilling temperatures to help their efforts, while we are sweating it out, hanging around 0C they are around -40F. Yes, MINUS fourty degrees. In case you are wondering what that is in Celsius, well it’s -40. I never really knew the two converged, but there you go. That will freeze that brass monkey right off it’s balls, to be sure. I’m jealous. Not of the monkey, but of the truly awesome ice-friendly climate (That’s a pun, climb-it, get it? You are welcome).

In any case a very very cool endeavour and the towers look awesome.

ps, I’m pretty sure I stole the link to the site from Metafilter a few days ago.