Smooth moves
When the skates go on, the inner child comes out at Los Alamos County Ice Rink
There’s something about ice skating outdoors—making skillful swirls on the ice or stumbling on the arm of a friend—that evokes nostalgia for childhood winters and holidays. Surrounded by tall pines at the bottom of Los Alamos Canyon with the iconic Omega Bridge that connects the community of Los Alamos to the national laboratory lies New Mexico’s only outdoor ice skating rink.
At Los Alamos County Ice Rink, you might rediscover your inner child at the Skate With Santa event on Dec. 15 and 16, or rekindle the magic of the holidays at the Luminarias Skate on Dec. 24.
“The Luminarias Skate has become a Christmas Eve holiday tradition, with families coming from other parts of the state year after year,” said Dianne Marquez, Los Alamos County Recreation Programs Manager and Ice Rink Manager. “For the Santa Skate, we get a couple staff to be skating elves who hand out candy canes. We also added an Ugly Sweater Contest with games and prizes on the night before Christmas break.”
Marquez said the rink is especially magical when there’s snow piled on the canyon walls and draping the trees. If it snows more than an inch or two in the uncovered rink, the County dispatches its snowblowers—including a heavy-duty sidewalk snowblower—to clear snow from the ice.
“The Zamboni is not a snow removal machine,” Marquez said.
The rink’s original Zamboni toured with the Ice Capades in 1952. It was sold to Los Alamos by Albuquerque’s Iceland Skating Arena in 1961. In 1973, the garage at the rink caught fire and Zamboni driver Ted Dunn raced into the burning building to drive it to safety. The famous machine now resides in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. But that’s just part of the history behind the rink. “The skating rink was a holdover from the Los Alamos Ranch School, built on what they called Douglas Pond in the 1930s,” said Los Alamos History Museum Archivist Rebecca Collinsworth. “It didn’t look like a rink then, just a big frozen pond.”
After the boys’ school was closed, the Manhattan Project scientists and their families continued skating there in the 1940s. Some of the people memorialized on the Wall of Fame in the ice rink locker room were part of the Los Alamos Skating Club who ran the rink for around 40 years before the county assumed ownership. The rink grounds are the only land owned by the county in Los Alamos Canyon, an otherwise active part of the laboratory campus owned by the Department of Energy.
“The original skating area was about 100 yards from where it is now and was just a dirt area they’d flood with sprinklers until the water froze,” Marquez explained. “They relocated it and built it to National Hockey League regulations.”
Now the surface is a concrete pad with refrigeration piping that keeps the ice steadily frozen regardless of outdoor temperatures as high as 70 degrees.
The ice is painted white with a biodegradable chalk-based material that provides contrast for the blue hockey markings. “There are leaves and moths and stuff like that in the ice,” Marquez said. “That can’t be helped out here.”
While Renee Dunwoody (who’s also the high school assistant principal) coached the 14-and-under division one evening, the scoreboard displayed a 38-degree temperature outside. Inside the locker room, her husband, John, who also coaches, talked about the camaraderie his family has found within the regional hockey league. “It’s really a big, extended family of hockey players. Even after the fights on the ice, we all go to dinner together,” he said. Also, all of the Los Alamos Hockey Association leagues are coed, from the little kids to the adult pickup games.
During the week, Marquez sees regulars from the community during the recreational noontime adult skate. “One of our senior skaters brings her Harry Belfonte CD for us to play over the speakers while she skates for an hour,” Marquez said. “She’s fun to watch.”
Weekend lessons are also good entertainment as new skaters learn to stand, move forward and stop before progressing to going backward. “You wouldn’t believe how difficult it can be just to stand,” Marquez said. “But we usually see people go from using the skate aids to feeling comfortable and skating on their own in about 30 minutes.”