The idea of a bike race on a frozen lake is intriguing. I know that mountain bikes with studded tires have great traction in ice and i was envisioning something like a criterium...just on a frozen lake instead of downtown streets.
Brenda and I went out to watch the bike race which was held as part of the “art shanty projects” festival on Medicine Lake in Minnesota. Turns out that while it was definitely a bike race on ice, it was a lot crazier than we expected. There were indeed some bad-ass ice racing machines in the mix, but overall it was more for fun than for real. The whole shanty project thing is very strange. It’s a bunch of artists who’ve created art inside, outside, and sometimes out of little structures on top of the frozen lake. Neither of us could quite figure it out, but it was pretty fascinating. There was a post office shanty, from which one could evidently send and receive actual mail, there was one that was built to resemble the last half of an airplane (?), there was the obligatory robot shanty, one that could be driven around.... it went on and on.
Regardless, it was pretty great for gawking at all the crazies who seemed to be having the time of their lives, and it was also the first-time out for my new telephoto lens...good practice shooting moving targets for the safari to come.
this looks like burning man for ice-people. im bummed i didnt make it last winter. wanna build an art car next year? or we could bring an element of burning man to the ice, and burn some big shit on tie ice. would that make people nervous?
Posted by: al kelly | May 11, 2008 at 08:30 AM