Ouray Ice Park Inc

"Our Water Our Future" – Help the Ouray Ice Park raise the remaining funds to complete construction on its own water source and ensure a sustainable future for the next generation of ice climbers.

Greetings ice lovers! You might remember when we first announced the “Our Water Our Future” project back in 2022. This endeavor is a $1.4 million dollar capital campaign aimed at building the infrastructure needed for the Ouray Ice Park to create & maintain its own water source, independent of the City of Ouray.

Our Water Our Future is undoubtedly the most important project the ice park has taken on in its nearly 30 years of existence. Securing our own water source is critical to ensure the ice park's position as a community climbing resource for future generations.

As a nonprofit organization, our mission at the Ouray Ice Park is to create and operate a free, public ice climbing park each season. This business of ice not only serves the climbing community, but also supports the winter economy of the town of Ouray. Maintaining the country's largest man-made ice park, however, is no simple undertaking. It comes at a cost – to pay ice farmers, staff, and maintain the systems in place to make ice and keep the park up and running. It also requires a LOT of water!

As the ice park grows in popularity and more climbers travel to Ouray to climb in the Uncompahgre Gorge each season, the issue of water has become more pressing.

Since its founding in 1995, the ice park has farmed ice using excess water from the City of Ouray’s storage tanks. The amount of water available to the Ouray Ice Park depends on how much overflow those tanks have at any given time. When there are more people in town, more city water is required to support the population – for flushing toilets, potable drinking water, showering, and backup reserves for things like fire suppression. Because the city needs to maintain certain levels of water for emergencies, that means there is less overflow for the ice park to make ice when there are more people in Ouray.

The problem with this arrangement is that we simply do not have enough water in the city’s overflow tanks to grow ice across the entire park at any given time. The current model of water usage being tied to the city is not sustainable.

Right now, ice farmers can only make ice for about half the park at any given time when temperatures are right and we’re allowed to draw from the overflow tanks. We’ve been making it work, but our ability to farm ice is inevitably severely limited by the nature of our current arrangement with the city.

As more and more people travel to Ouray each winter to climb in the Uncompahgre Gorge, you quickly start to see the predicament. More people in town is great, but it means less water for making ice and this becomes problematic if ice is the main reason people are visiting town in the winter months.

So how do we solve this predicament? The answer may seem obvious – the ice park needs a water source that is separate from the city in order to sustain its current scale and future growth. Ok, so how do we get there?

We get there with Our Water Our Future – a complex, $1.4 million endeavor that will finally allow the ice park its own water source. If we can raise the remaining funds, this project will effectively enable the ice park to have a reliable, sustainable water source that is not tied to the City of Ouray’s overflow supplies.

It’s a no brainer. Can you imagine if the Ice Park was able to farm ice across the entire length of the park during the 6 weeks it has to build ice before opening? The amount of terrain we could farm at one time would increase three-fold, creating more ice to meet the demands of more climbers coming to Ouray each year.