Dakota Curling - Prep for season

As requested, here are more images from Dakota Curling in Lakeville, MN. We're in the process of preparing for the upcoming 2017/2018 season. Right now this mostly consists of making ice.

This is a view from the "club room" or "warm room" into the ice shed. The club room has a lot of chairs and tables for viewing the ice or socializing, as well as a small bar. The blue and red items hanging (kind of ) along the walk way are the rings for the houses that'll be put down in the next few days.

This is the scoreboard side of the ice shed. Curlers come in from this side. If you look where the ice meets the walkway, you'll see the sand we use to create a dam that keeps the water from running under the walkway before it freezes. The sand is laid down, moistened, and allowed to freeze.

This is the larger of our two ice sheets. This one will contain four curling sheets once completed. The green/yellow color you see is the glycol running through the chilling mats. The chiller (not pictured) cools the glycol down to about 18 degrees F and continuously circulates it throughout the mats. The whole system contains approximately 1200 gallons of glycol.

Here you can see both the smaller sheet and the larger sheet. These photos were taken about 2 hours after a flood had completed, and you can see that water is nearly completely frozen. We put water down in layers three times per day. At first we're just trying to get a good volume of water out, but as we near the target thickness, the layers get thinner and freeze faster.

One of our curling stones. They weigh 42 pounds each, and are made from solid granite.

Another picture, looking from the scoreboard end down the smaller of the two ice sheets. You can see the windows to the club room on the left. Once we have the desired ice thickness, we'll put down layers of white paper. Over top of this we put down the houses and lines for each of our 6 curling sheets. Several more layers of ice are built above that, and the prepared for curling.

Link to the previous post, showing a freshly completed flood: http://imgur.com/gallery/9O1jhOY

If you're in or near Lakeville, MN, feel free to stop by sometime. We welcome the public to come in, hang out, and watch curling. The season begins in early October.