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Warm winter melting hopes for skating rink

Washington Grove says it will try to build homemade skating venue next year

Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2006

Instead of the icy playground it was meant to be, it’s been a fluke, a $500 puddle of melted plans and more a lure for leaves and twigs than for ice skates and youthful revelry.

And for this, fingers of blame can be aimed skyward.

‘‘What we were thinking was the weather was supposed to get colder,” said Missy Yachup, of Washington Grove who helped secure town funds to build a homemade ice skating rink in the small town near Gaithersburg. ‘‘But then it didn’t get colder.”

At least not until last week, when the mercury bottomed out and set the stage for the snowy wallop that came over the weekend to remind us that it is, after all, February.

But by then, after weeks of warm temperatures had kept snow shovels—and, indeed, ice skates—packed away, the roughly 70-by-90-foot skating rink, whose berm of bagged mulch and white plastic liner was to harbor a plane of ice, had collected only debris aloft in the curiously mild winds.

As the month draws to a close, its designers say that if the cold holds and the puddle freezes, they may pour water atop the existing ice, covered though it may be with leaves and twigs, to create a flat skating surface for what little winter remains.

But it’s more likely, they say, that the rink, built as a safe alternative to treading upon on the town’s Maple Lake, will be gone by the end of the month, packed away with myriad other wintertime tools judged useless by untimely tepidity.

‘‘I guess this was an interesting year to try this experiment,” said Carolyn Rapkievian, who along with Missy Yachup pitched the idea of the rink and helped build it last year.

Rapkievian, who got the idea after watching ‘‘This Old House,” a television show on remodeling, said she thought it was odd that the coldest weather this season came late last year. ‘‘Maybe next year we’ll try to get it organized maybe even at Thanksgiving time.”

January was the warmest on record for the region, with the average temperature of 41.8 degrees slightly higher than the record set in 1990, according to the National Climactic Data Center.

But plans for the rink began long before any indication that its use would be preempted entirely by nature.

Rapkievian and Yachup began pitching the idea at town meetings late last year; town leaders, in turn, raised several concerns over whether the rink’s costs were justified given that its viability would depend on the fickle moods of the weather.

Once this and other issues were settled, building the rink took the time needed to buy the bags of mulch, the white liner—whose reflective color would help the ice melt—and a water meter, which they used with a garden hose and a fire hydrant to fill the rink.

‘‘It took like a whole day and a night” to fill it, Yachup said.

Then they waited for the freeze. And waited. And waited.

Nearly two months later, Yachup and Rapkievian, as well as others who helped build it and those who have waited to use it, have realized that the hardest part of constructing a homemade rink may come after you’ve done all you can.

Washington Grove Councilman Darrell Anderson says he’s driven past the field and noticed the rink sitting unused at a time of year when even the town’s lake freezes for short periods.

‘‘It collects anything that blows,” he said, chuckling. ‘‘It’s a real joke around town.”

Even though the unfrozen rink has in other ways been ‘‘a kid magnet,” Yachup said, referring to how some youths have tossed things into it, she said they will keep it open because, ‘‘if we pull it out, guaranteed, we’d get colder weather.”

But with forecasts showing temperatures in the coming days hovering in the 40s and 50s, it looks like their best hopes for the homemade rink will come next year.

‘‘I think there’s some disappointment,” Rapkievian said. ‘‘But we’re a resilient group and we don’t give up easy.”