Coming soon: Indoor ice

The long summer without ice at Cloquet's Northwoods Credit Union Arena is coming to a close, with delivery and installation of a new cooling tower completed earlier this week.

Facilities manager Justin Harriman expects to have ice within two weeks, which should allow the Minnesota Wilderness junior hockey team to come back home and youth and high school hockey seasons to progress as normal.

Harriman said the cooling tower works like a giant car radiator, cooling the freon after it passes under the ice. On Wednesday they were in the final testing phases of the new equipment.

"We should be able to flip on the ice plant tomorrow morning and by month's end we'll have ice again," he said. He expected to start painting the ice Monday.

Harriman said it's a 12-day process.

"You leave a small, probably sixteenth of an inch of ice down and then you paint the white portion over it," he said. "Then you put your lines and dots and circles, lay down logos and things like that. Then it takes about 105 floods to be skateable ice. So we'll run 24-hour days for about 10 days once we get the ice white on. It's quite a process."

Now in his ninth year at Northwoods, Harriman estimated the rink lost more than $50,000 in ice rentals while the building was closed. On the bright side, he said they got lots of repairs and upgrades completed, including replacing ceiling tiles with tiles donated by USG, replacing scoreboard lights, painting locker rooms and more.

"I feel really good about where the building's at," he said. "Now we get to make ice and get back to playing hockey."