Over the river and through the woods, ice skating on a new northern Minnesota trail

Skaters have a lot of ice to choose from in Minnesota. Now a Zamboni-maintained forest path is in the mix.

At the Northland Arboretum in Brainerd-Baxter, staff are trying out something new by turning a bike trail into what is believed to be the first manufactured forest ice skating path in the state.

The half-mile loop winds through the woods with hills and berms within the 400-acre nature preserve on the site of an old landfill. It’s an outdoor experiment that gained hundreds of visitors within the first days of opening before the holidays.

“We are learning how difficult it is to Zamboni hills,” said Trevor Pumnea, the arboretum’s executive director. “This is not like maintaining a rink. This is so difficult. It is such a steep learning curve.”

As a nonprofit with aspirations that exceed financial capacities, Pumnea said they are making it work and learning as they glide along.

The skating path opened Dec. 21 with nearly 100 people visiting on the first day. It will stay up and running until March, weather permitting.

On Monday, the Donahue family, visiting the Brainerd Lakes area from San Francisco, skated the loop after snowmobiling plans fell through. Back home in Brainerd on college break, sisters Stella and Chloe Marohn laced up their figure skates at sunset.

Michaela Feser, of Robbinsdale, and her son Emerson, 10, skated the path with family that afternoon. She coaches his mite team and played hockey at St. Ben’s while her father, Ken Potts, played pro hockey in Europe.

“Our family is all big into skating,” Feser said. “So when we saw that there was this new trail through the woods — the first Minnesota trail through the woods — we thought it was really exciting."

Potts said with a laugh that “uphill is more negotiable. Downhill is more like skiing.”

“I was just telling the kids, ‘You guys have never skated up and down hill before,’ ” he said.

But he watched as his grandkids skated the path with ease. For as long as he’s been skating, he said, he hasn’t seen something quite like this.

Pumnea, who is from northern Idaho, had no idea what that was, he said, but learned of examples in Quebec and Boulder Junction, Wis., home to the Glide Ice Skating Ribbon, just under a mile long. He saw the Glide was completely run by volunteers, and he thought it was possible to create something similar in northern Minnesota.

“We haven’t had snow in two years. I’d rather take my chances with ice,” he said. “So I started bidding on Zambonis.”

At a public surplus auction, he won a Zamboni for $1,650. A crew uses personal trucks with 275-gallon water tanks “to build as much ice as we can, as quick as we can,” he said. “And we Zamboni it as many times as we can during the day.”

Because water wants to flow downhill, he said it’s a challenge getting the ice to stay on the crest and not fall in the troughs. So they put snow in front of the drag system to make “slush logs” along the sides of the path.

The ice can get rough in spots, he said, but it will smooth out as more layers are added throughout the winter.