About 10 years ago, a group of climbers worked with the City of Duluth to make a chunk of vacant land into Quarry Park.

“We turned what used to be an abandoned, junky party space into a usable park,” Nick Fleming said.

He got in on the ground floor. The Quarry Park plans started with accessible paths and mountain biking trails. The vision included areas for people to ice climb in the winter.

“And kind of the final component of all that was building the ice farm,” Fleming said. “So we sunk in 1,500 feet of pipe and power line and built a pumphouse that is underground, so you can’t really see it.”

Water comes in from the city and is pumped up to the top of the quarry, where there are spigots that can be turned on and off to make ice climbing routes. The water is always moving so it doesn’t freeze. In recent years, the ice hasn’t formed very well naturally.

“This is a prime example of how we can take what would just be natural rock that you can’t ice climb on and turn it into climbable ice. In a nice, wet fall, we could potentially see all this naturally forming. So it helps kind of fill in the gaps,” Fleming said.

The ice needs to be 4-6 inches thick for climbing. January’s cold snap helped with that.

“That deep freeze we had last week enabled us to make climbs from scratch in a couple days versus weeks,” he said.

Juliette Homme climbed right on board with the ice farming efforts and is involved with this Saturday’s Ice & Mixed Fest at Quarry Park. She loves that the festival is so beginner-friendly.

“Anything where you get to work really hard physically and just kind of get a little higher and then challenge yourself and when it becomes more difficult, you can climb a little harder and get to the top and then just feel accomplished,” she said.

Quarry Park is one of three places in the state of Minnesota that ice farm.