Crew of ice experts is busy just chillin’

Early in the planning for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, it was clear Spokane didn’t have enough ice for the weeklong skate-a-palooza.

Someone suggested a frosty sheet be put down in the newest addition of the Spokane Convention Center, though the temperature inside was a balmy 70 degrees and its centralized air didn’t exactly dial all the way down to winter wonderland.

Organizers needed people who could make ice in the middle of the desert, if necessary, and they found them – in Texas.

“We do the challenging rinks nobody else will do,” said Mike Clayton, who owns Ice Rink Events of Houston.

Fresh from building an outdoor rink complete with palm trees in San Jose, Calif., Clayton’s crew hustled Sunday to install a 200- by 85-foot rink in Spokane.

Workers strung more than 27 miles of plastic tubing across the Convention Center floor, then encircled their creation with hockey arena-style crash boards. Their goal was to have several thousand gallons of polypropylene glycol coursing through the tubing by early this morning.

Cooled to 5 degrees by a massive portable refrigerator, the glycol makes the tubing ready to be sprayed with water after only a few hours.

And after a few days of irrigating, there should be 3 or 4 inches of competition-quality ice on the floor ready for some of the country’s best skaters.

It’s a method that works just about anywhere with few problems.

“We did a hockey rink in Lambeau Field for the Ohio State-Wisconsin hockey game last year,” said Don “Scooter” Mosher, who took up building rinks a couple years ago as a post-retirement job.

Ice in Green Bay, Wis., isn’t hard to come by, but Lambeau Field, where the Green Bay Packers football team plays, sports a four-layer, multimillion-dollar natural grass field with heating pipes running beneath it.

Damage from a hockey game would have made cheeseheads livid.

Clayton said the technology behind the Ice Rink Events ice is the same as that used by many permanent rinks across the country, which is why it’s popular in the competitive figure skating world; it feels like permanent ice.

Clayton’s family used the method in their own ice arena until getting into the ice contracting business eight or nine years ago.

Various organizations in Texas approached Clayton about where they might get temporary ice for special events.

For a while Clayton referred them to other businesses, but eventually he decided to fill the niche himself.

The technology behind the ice arenas was created more than 30 years ago by Cal MacCracken, a New Jersey inventor who began toying with glycol-cooled tubes as an easy method of refrigeration.

Later, experimenting with heated tubes, MacCracken invented the rolling hot dog cooker based on the same principle.

The skating championships begin Sunday. Four junior skating events will be held in the Convention Center Jan. 22-24.