Think You’re Tough? Spend an Afternoon at Minnesota’s Coldest Ice Fishing Derby.

“There is no safe ice” is a common aphorism among anglers who fish on frozen lakes and rivers. But the primal drive to hook the first walleye of winter—and post the trophy on social media—can lead to questionable choices. In December 2023 on northern Minnesota’s Upper Red Lake, 122 people were rescued after a small crack turned into a 30-foot gap of open water. No one died that day, but four people did end up in the water.

Two years after this incident, I’m staring out at the same vast expanse from the eastern shoreline of Upper Red Lake, about 40 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border. It’s mid-December, minus ten degrees Fahrenheit, and there is between 12 and 14 inches of ice underfoot. I’ve hitched a ride in a SnoBear, a micro party bus that zooms around on snow tracks and boasts four holes in the floor for fishing. We’re gliding across the windswept, white, and desolate surface of the lake, which covers 120,000 acres. I can’t see to the far shore because fierce winds are whipping up snow. But I can see dozens of fish houses, from soft-sided pop-up tents to luxurious, RV-like “Ice Castles” scattered like rainbow-colored Skittles across the surface.

Most of the anglers are here for the Kelliher Fire and Rescue Relief Association Fishing Derby, a day-long contest where participants pay a $20 fee to catch up to four walleye (only one longer than 17 inches). Anglers enter each fish in a prize pool drawing. For a $50 derby and raffle entry, entrants have a chance to win even bigger prizes like an Ambush Slayer Skid House, an Arctic Cat Kitty Cat 120 snowmobile, or $1,000 cash. All proceeds go toward a fire truck that will cost the department three-quarters of a million dollars.

We reach a yellow icehouse, a half mile out, where an American flag on a tall pole is furiously flapping. Cole Koisti, the owner of Cole’s Snobear Expeditions, drops me off and drives away with his guests, a local wild rice farmer and his visiting family from North Dakota.

I’m no stranger to cold—I grew up in northern Minnesota. And I learned how to fish for walleye (in the summer) when I was about four. But I am a stranger to the rarefied world of ice fishing. In the 30 seconds I’m outside, the only bare skin on my face—about an inch around my eyes and cheeks—goes numb. The rest of me is bundled into an expedition puffy and down snow pants, a pair of choppers that reach my elbows, a buff, fleece hat, and boots designed for the Arctic.

I open the icehouse door, step inside, and immediately break into a sweat as a half-dozen uniformed men, volunteers from the 27-member Kelliher Volunteer Fire Department crew, nod hello. The group includes its stoic chief, Rick Thayer, a man of few words who offers me a bowl of his homemade barbecue. He leaves most of the talking to his mustachioed assistant chief, Mark Bieganek, who is clearly pumped that this day, which has been on his bucket list for decades, has finally arrived.

“We haven’t had a fishing derby in 22 years!” Bieganek booms. The contest used to be held by the North Beltrami Sportsmen’s Club every January or February, but the event organizers either passed away or moved on. Despite the dangerously frigid conditions outside, Bieganek is thrilled that, after a few thin years, the lake is nearly frozen solid.

“The good lord has been making ice for us!” he exclaims. “I was just telling the guys, ‘Fellas, I’m not afraid of failure, I’m afraid this is going to be so big that it’s overwhelming.’”

Of the 1.4 million licensed anglers in Minnesota, 150,000 ice fish. Add out-of-staters and the number increases by several thousand. Between early December and late February, the eastern end of Upper Red Lake will attract 65,000 to 85,000 anglers, who will fish a combined total of two million hours. The nearest town, Kelliher, has a population of 249. The draw to this remote, hard-to-reach lake seems strange to an outsider, but to an ice fisherman, it makes perfect sense.

First, the lake is shaped like a dog’s bowl—wide and shallow. With a maximum depth of 15 feet, there is no thermocline—a transition layer between warmer surface water and colder deep water that can contribute to an inconsistent freeze. In other words, when a cold snap hits, the lake freezes.

Second, the lake is full of fish. That’s because only one-third of Upper Red Lake is open to the public. The other two-thirds and all of connecting Lower Red Lake, which together comprise the largest body of water in Minnesota, is under the jurisdiction of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. Only tribal members can fish those waters. Walleye, however, do not pay attention to boundaries.

“Tribal members have lived here forever,” says Pat Brown, who has been Red Lake Nation’s fisheries director for 30 years. “They believe that if they take care of the lake, the lake will always take care of them. To this day, that’s what the tribe does.”

Tony Kennedy, a large lake specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), agrees. “Upper Red Lake is in a great place, walleye population-wise; we have lots of data that suggest levels of harvest are very sustainable.”

Through generations of trial and error, most Red Lake Nation members know to stay off the big lake in the early winter, opting instead to fish for trout in smaller lakes and streams.

There’s a third reason ice fishermen flock to Upper Red Lake: the Kelliher Volunteer Fire Department. Its 27 volunteers understand the lake’s dynamics and are well trained in technical ice rescue. The department keeps equipment—cold-water immersion “gumby” suits, ropes, life preservers, snowmobiles, an inflatable rapid-deployment fortuna boat, plus a flat-bottomed john boat—at West Wind Resort, headquarters for the derby. They know how to pull anglers out of the water or off a stranded ice floe. This level of ice safety protocol, training, and gear is highly unusual for a cash-strapped, rural Minnesota volunteer fire department. But it’s essential here.

“Ice is like mechanics wire—you can bend it 100 times and it will never break,” Bieganek said during a call prior to the derby. “But just when you think you’re doing everything right, it will crack.”

He regaled me with tales of misfortune or stupidity, which included an airplane pilot who landed on the ice and skidded the plane into open water; one guy who fell below the ice while driving his all-terrain vehicle and broke his wrist trying to punch a hole through to get back out; a close friend who has gone through the ice in his truck multiple times while plowing roads.

These folks survived, but others weren’t as lucky. In 2017, a young couple broke through a hole in the ice with an all-terrain vehicle. Neither survived. “There’s been tragedy here,” Bieganek told me. “For us, this is serious business.”

There’s only one person who can restrict motorized access to the non-tribal portion of the lake, and that’s the Beltrami County Sheriff, who did so in late December 2023 after the mass rescue. But ice fishing is the primary economic driver here in winter and there’s pressure to let anglers fish.

Fishermen queasy about ice safety seek out Scott Waldo, a member of the Kelliher Volunteer Fire Department, and co-owner, with his brother Kevin, of West Wind Resort.

“Scott is our ice guy,” Bieganek says. “He’s our expert. He’s ultraconservative and I respect that.”

Waldo, who grew up in Kelliher, has fished on the lake since he was a kid. His dad, a former logger, and his mom, a former schoolteacher, founded West Wind in 2000. The family’s well-maintained resort, in the unincorporated village of Waskish, 15 miles north of Kelliher, includes a bait shop, restaurant and bar, eight cabins, and an RV camping area. In the winter Waldo plows approximately 14 miles of ice roads, along which he and his crew drag out ice houses for day and overnight use by his guests. In the quarter-century he’s been plowing roads, Waldo has never crashed through.

West Wind was hopping when I rolled in the morning before the derby, with participants buying silver shiners for $12 per-scoop in the bait shop, problem solving sub-zero issues, like a seized-up snowmobile; or stocking their vehicles with a few six packs of Busch Light.

I met Waldo, an outdoorsman’s outdoorsman with a reddish beard and a Carhartt beanie pulled close over his ears, out on the ice. Later in the day, he gave me a lift in his pickup truck. When I hopped in his cab, I absentmindedly pulled on my seatbelt.

“You don’t need your seatbelt on the ice,” Waldo quickly reminded me. A chill electrified my body as I envisioned myself trying to unbuckle it underwater. But if Waldo said it was OK to be out here, this ice is as safe as ice gets.

“I err on the side of caution,” he told me. “The last thing I would want to do is send people out on the lake knowing there’s a bad situation and someone might not get home to their family.”

In the beginning of the season, normally around Thanksgiving, Waldo flies a drone over the ice as it’s forming. When the near shoreline is covered by three to four inches, he’ll walk out to look at “bad spots,” which are identifiable by discolorations or cracks.

The process is slow and involves using a spud bar—a heavy piece of steel—to pound on the ice directly in front of him. If the spud bar smashes through, a person could too. He’ll also drill holes with an auger to determine ice thickness. Four inches is generally safe to hold the weight of a human and small vehicles, but Waldo steers clear of proclaiming hard and fast rules.

“Oftentimes ice may look solid close to shore, but there will be open water five or six miles out,” he tells me. “That’s usually what gets people into trouble. They get stranded on sheets of ice and are pushed out toward the open water.”

Another serious issue is pressure ridges that form along cracks in the ice. When the temperature warms, the ice expands, and it starts heaving upward. When the temperature drops again at night, the ice will contract and pull apart. Conditions vary by the day; the reason anglers check in regularly with Waldo’s ice reports on the resort’s Facebook page.

I later corroborated Waldo’s ice safety technique with Luc Mehl, an Alaskan geologist who has traveled 10,000 miles through the backcountry and devoted his life to understanding ice’s “evolution from first freeze to final thaw,” as he phrases it.

“Anyone traveling on it should know how to test its strength,” Mehl told me. “For the fishing community, that’s what a spud bar is for.”

And the key to testing ice is to test it as you go. “Whenever there is a change in texture—from black ice to white ice to gray ice or to ice with frost—it’s essential to test at that transition because ice with a different texture may be younger or older.”

Mehl isn’t fond of the adage “There is no safe ice.” The wood pulp industry, which uses massive trucks to haul heavy timber loads across frozen lakes, derived a formula for ice strength long ago. “When you watch a semi-truck drive across ice, that’s safe ice,” he says. The trouble, however, is that this science “is not very accessible to people who want to fish or skate.”

That’s why he founded Triple Point Training, through which he offers online and in-person ice safety classes. Mehl is also writing a book about ice safety, which he projects will take years to finish. Until then, his most essential tip is this, as he phrases it: “Everyone should have ice rescue picks hanging around their neck. It’s the cheapest safety equipment you can buy. Get the damn picks.”

Ice picks, which are handheld metal spikes attached to a lanyard, allow a person to pull themselves across a fragile, slippery surface after falling into frigid water. According to the Minnesota DNR, when a person falls through the ice, they will have about one minute to control their breathing, ten minutes of purposeful movement toward self rescue, and an hour before they lose consciousness.

For that crucial ten-minute period after falling in, the DNR presents a six-point plan for survival. Don’t panic. Turn toward the direction you came from because that is likely the strongest ice. Call for help as loudly as you can. Fan your arms out on the ice as widely as possible. Kick your legs up to get as horizontal as possible to propel yourself onto the ice. Roll away from the hole and crawl up onto your hands and knees. Walk away.

Back in Waldo’s pickup truck, he tells me that the most common error made by Upper Red Lake anglers is to drive over a quarter-inch crack in the morning, and to assume the fissure will stay small. As the hours tick by, the wind shifts, and a tiny crack may open into a four-foot-wide rift. On their return trip, unassuming anglers will drive right into the water.

“I know how this lake works,” Waldo says. “A lot could be avoidable if common sense would prevail.”

As the day unfolds I witness a wide sector of humanity out catching walleye: Six young boys—children of the firefighters—are thrilled to be fishing in their own icehouse through holes that glow fluorescent green, via devices known as rattle wheels, which jingle if a fish is on the line. Heated by propane and stocked with snacks, the kids are in heaven with a grandpa stationed in his own house a few feet away, should trouble arise.

“I just like fishing. I don’t care if I get a prize,” one of the boys tells me.

Closer to shore, two guys from suburban Minneapolis, Matt Wavrin and Adam Benedict, brave the sub-zero temps in a pop-up tent warmed to 50 degrees by a propane heater. Two foiled breakfast burritos warm on the device when I arrive.

“We come up here every year, the derby is just a bonus,” Wavrin says. Two days earlier, they had caught 22 walleye in four hours. Wavrin tells me that several buddies are also at the derby, fishing from hard-sided huts. “We’re the only ones man enough to fish in a tent,” he adds.

In the plush digs of a 17-foot-long Ice Castle, an RV padded with thick insulation, the most luxurious of which can cost $75,000, I meet Mike Lillemo, a veteran angler who was watching fish swim eight feet below on his sprawling TV. The images are beamed via his Garmin LiveScope, which uses sonar technology. His fishing lines drop through the floor of the RV’s full kitchen.

“You can split the screen to watch the Vikings,” Lillemo tells me. As he changes the screen to demonstrate the technology, a nearby friend reels in a perfect, shimmering 17-inch walleye.

At 3 P.M. sharp, back at headquarters, the firemen breathe a collective sigh of relief and start breaking down tables, collecting accumulated garbage, and disassembling the flagpole. Later Bieganek will tell me that the fire department earned more than $34,000 toward the new fire truck.

Not everyone clears off the ice, however. Even after 4 P.M., as the temp drops to minus 12 Fahrenheit, the wind picks up a few notches, and the sun drops below the western horizon, there are still anglers out on the ice, one of whom tells me, “The fishing gets good in the dark.”

I catch a ride back to shore and head inside the restaurant to defrost and indulge in the house special, a bowl of creamy wild rice soup. The grand prize winners will be pulled from a minnow bucket at 6 P.M., but in the meantime, anglers huddle at the bar nursing whiskeys, eating monster plates of nachos, and watching a Minnesota Wild hockey game under a sign that reads “Let’s keep dumbfuckery to a minimum today.”

I want to stick around and see how the post-fishing revelry unfolds, but given the starless night and the sinking, sub-zero temperatures ahead, I decide it’s time to start the three-hour drive home. When I exit the bar into the frigid air, I hear the unmistakable boom of Mark Bieganek greeting one of his men, who has finally come off the ice.

“How you doin’, man?” he says.

“I’m cold as hell, man. Cold as hell.”

Want to know more about ice safety amid the 2026 winter? Articles Editor Frederick Dreier spoke to ice experts and has additional information in the comments section of this story. Do you have a question about ice fishing safety? Feel free to write it in the comments!