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Tag Archives: Sandstone Minnesota


I first became of the Sandstone Ice Festival several years ago when an Adventure Club at the local University had it on their schedule of events. I looked it up and decided it would be worth a trip over to see what was going on. I had been heavily involved in snow and ice climbing in a previous life and wanted to see how much things had changed.


As it turned out the weekend of the Festival was a major storm and we were snowed in for several days. I put it on the schedule for the next year but as it turned out the weather was really warm and I figured they wouldn’t have much ice for climbing since most of the ice around here had melted.


This year was to be my third attempt. The weather was warm but I noticed on their website that they were using man made ice so it was more likely they would have ice. The Festival is held in Robinson Park along the Kettle River and next to Banning State Park.


I’m not sure why but we seem to have problems finding our way around in Sandstone. After driving through town and not seeing any signs to Riverside Park or the Ice Festival we stopped and asked a few people, all locals. None of them knew about the Ice Festival. We resumed our search and I finally recognized a landmark from a previous visit and headed off to the park.


We visited on the first day of the Festival figuring it would be less crowed and would give us a chance to look around. On this particular day they were conducting beginning ice climbing lessons on the beginners wall. We watched them for a while and then found out that more climbing was taking place further into the park along the walls formed by the old Banning Sandstone Quarry.


We watched for a couple of hours as the climbers made their way up the various ice walls. A couple of things that stuck me were the number of women that were climbing. Of course the equipment has changed a lot. The crampons and ice axes had all changed. The harnesses are now all webbing. In my day we made our harnesses out of rope.


Since the Festival is held in the Ice Park that is used throughout the ice climbing season we plan on stopping if we are in the area on a weekend because there will likely be someone climbing.


More photos from the Sandstone Ice Festival can be found on my website.