PLYMOUTH, Mich. – Even as the month of January ends with brutally cold weather, there’s an event happening this weekend in Plymouth that brings thousands out every year, regardless of the weather.
“It’s Plymouth Ice Festival weekend,” Sam Plymale, the director of the Plymouth Downtown Development Authority, said on Friday. “It’s a bit chilly, but that’s how we like it down here.”
Temperatures struggled into the teens on Friday and are expected to dip below zero on Friday and Saturday nights.
But, despite the cold, Kellogg Park was filled with the sounds of chainsaws and chisels hitting 350lb blocks of ice in preparation for the festival.
“Generally, we have, you know, 300 plus events in the downtown area throughout the year, not as many during the wintertime, right?” Plymale said. “This is the big one in the winter.”
The ice festival will feature food, a large zip line, warming stations, and many ice sculptures.
The event highlights local businesses in the city and is a huge hit every year.
“On average, it brings about 60 to 80,000 visitors from outside the city and township of Plymouth to the area,” Plymale said. “So, it is a huge economic driver.”
The ice carvers were hard at work on Friday morning, assembling the sculptures for this weekend.
Some of them were carved by a group of students from Oakland Community College’s ice carving team.
“A lot of times, you start out in college in a culinary program; they have different classes and clubs, and when they come in, they compete at different events,” James Gietzen, the Ice Festival organizer, said. “Plymouth is one of them.”
“For example, they’ll be here Saturday from 11:00 to 3:00, doing an individual competition,” he said. “Then we hire them back years later after they start their professional carving careers.
Ben Gobel was one of those students. His company, Top Shelf Ice, is responsible for a third of the sculptures people will see across Plymouth this weekend.
He got his start at the ice festival and says Plymouth holds a special place in his heart.
“It’s luck. It’s truly luck,” Gobel said. “I was training to be a chef, and the chef I apprenticed for carved ice. We worked at a country club, and I was just intrigued by it.”
“It all kind of connected back together, and that’s why Plymouth is special to me,” Gobel said.
Gobel says the process of crafting ice sculptures is grueling, with blocks weighing nearly 400lbs.
He quickly repaired a sculpture that broke while he was unloading it from his truck.
The Ice Festival is a dream for him.
“I was working in the kitchen for years,” Gobel said. “This was always a hobby, and it was like a dream to own my own shop and do this for a living. And it’s truly living the dream.”