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Tom Hoopman
Bayfield Winter Festival
Taking the Polar Plunge at the annual Bayfield Winter Festival, held the first weekend in March.
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Don Albrecht
Bayfield Winter Festival
Scott Armstrong, Bayfield rec center director and chairman of the fundraising group, takes the Polar Plunge at the Bayfield Winter Festival.
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Madeline Island Chamber of Commerce
Bayfield Winter Festival
Big Ice Golf uses tennis balls on a frozen nine-hole course.
Bayfield Winter Festival celebrates snow, ice and cabin fever. Over the first weekend of March, it offers crazy events like Big Ice Golf using tennis balls. Run on Water is a race across the “ice road” from Bayfield to Madeline Island and back (4 miles round trip), with participants walking, running and making the trip on snowshoes, skis, skates and sleds. There's a separate over-the-ice race for bicyclists, too.
Other major events include WinterDash, a 5K obstacle-course challenge at Mount Ashwabay Recreation Area, and a party called WinterBash.
Perhaps the wildest event is the Polar Bear Plunge. The fun started in 2006, when Friends of the Recreation Center organized a winter carnival and plunge, and 40 people signed up to jump into icy waters to raise money for the rec center. The event grew to three days, and in 2010 was renamed Bayfield Winter Festival. The plunge now gets 100 plungers and 400 spectators and last year raised $14,000 for the rec center.
Many plungers don wacky and elaborate costumes. Scott Armstrong, rec center director and chairman of the fundraising group, has taken the plunge all nine years and calls it “painfully cold” but not dangerous. “We really make a pageantry of it,” he says, adding that the event is open to sports teams, who will take home a portion of the proceeds.
Bayfield Winter Festival, first weekend in March. 715-779-5408, www.bayfieldwinterfestival.com.