Great Northern roll out looks to add muscle to local winter fests

The "Great Northern" is underway.

The inaugural run of the 10-day outdoor celebration seeks to integrate and amplify the festive-to-economic impacts of the sport-to-food-to-art events of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, City of Lakes Loppet Ski Festival and the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships this weekend at Lake Nokomis.

The idea of the Great Northern umbrella is that one-plus-one-plus-one can equal four or five, even in the dead of winter.

"Our No. 1 regional issue is the 'equity gap' [among female and minority workers in the workforce], No. 2 is the worker shortage and No. 3 is perceptions about winter," said R.T. Rybak, CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation who helped start the Loppet in 2002. "We can do all the summer festivals we want and the hotels are still full. But there's no American city that can offer what we can in the winter. It's also great that Minneapolis, St. Paul and the region are working together on this."

It's expected that Great Northern events will draw upward of 350,000 from the Twin Cities and others from Minnesota and contiguous states. The activities range from the Winter Carnival's Fire & Ice Art Show to YMCA family activities at St. Paul's Landmark Center to sports — skiing to fat-tire bicycling and ice fishing — plus dozens of theater, film and ethnic-feast opportunities.

This inaugural year is the prelude to the Great Northern draping around next year's Super Bowl in Minneapolis.

Last year, the Minnesota Super Bowl Host Committee estimated the Twin Cities area could reap $338 million in economic activity from the February 2018 game — a figure questioned by some economists.

CEO Melvin Tennant of Meet Minneapolis, the former city convention and visitors bureau, said the Super Bowl activities will drive the normally low winter occupancy rate of the 19,000 Twin Cities-area hotel rooms to 100 percent next year.

However, the Great Northern may have a more enduring impact because it will generate repeat and growing business that will help local hotels fill rooms every winter for up to 10 nights. And the first quarter of the year is the lowest occupancy period.

"The Great Northern is a great thing because in our community we've had this discussion for years about being better marketers of winter events," Tennant said. "We're working with our counterparts in St. Paul on this."

Minneapolis businessman Eric Dayton, Rybak and others cooked up the Great Northern. Dayton, an owner of the Bachelor Farmer restaurant and a retail shop in the North Loop, said last month in announcing Great Northern that it's time to turn winter into an asset.

The bet is that expanding and promoting the area's winter festivals under one umbrella is more than marketing. The exposure gained locally and nationally by leveraging Super Bowl 2018 should deepen these activities and traditions and pay economic dividends that grow in successive years.

In all, Meet Minneapolis says we'll draw 36 million visitors this year, up from 25 million in 2010, who will spend $300 to $400 per stay.