Fish Creek’s Silly Olympics Are Here Again

In winter, Door County largely takes a break from being Door County, the vacation destination that everybody and their rich uncle is dying to get to. There are visitors, there are people, there is most definitely life. But it’s all…just…a…bit…slower.

Except, of course, for the weekend of the Fish Creek Winter Festival, more affectionately known to many as Winter Games. That weekend, Door County not only gets lively again, it gets zany.

Door County’s wackiest festival has been going on for 26 years now, drawing visitors and locals alike out of their heated dwellings and into competitions like ice bowling, bed racing, and bicycle tossing. According to retired businessman and former Fish Creek Civic Association President Ron Merkel, the man behind it all, all those crazy ideas came from brainstorming sessions that took place in a relatively mundane setting.

“I think there were four or five of us that sat down in my living room and came up with the Winter Games,” said Merkel. “We just put our heads together and came up with some silly stuff.”

And indeed, it was silly. Imagined as Fish Creek’s own winter Olympics (complete with an upside down grill that served as a makeshift torch), Winter Games originally took place under a large tent on the Lake Michigan ice, before moving to the mainland recently due to lackluster wintry weather.

“Digger” DeGroot, who has been with Winter Games since the beginning and is still involved in organizing the event today, recalls that it used to take a couple weeks to set up the huge circus tent that was supposed to keep the cold at bay.

“One year, it was way below zero with the wind in the tent,” said DeGroot. “It was so cold that people were doing the ice bowling and two balls collided, and they just cracked in half.”

Another year, said DeGroot, it was so warm and rainy that the tent filled with three or four inches of water. White Gull Inn owner Andy Coulson, who used to run the food side of Winter Games, said he also remembers that year.

“By the end of the second day we were just standing in ice water,” said Coulson.

Every aspect of pulling the festival together, especially back in the early days, was a real community effort. But businesspeople and other locals worked tirelessly to make sure everything came together with only minor hiccups, which surprised DeGroot initially.

“I was the only person who thought it’d never work,” he said. “I thought no way will it ever work, putting that tent out on the ice. But all kinds of people were willing to help. In the summer everyone’s busy, but in the winter everyone wanted to do it.”

“It became a community event, is what it was,” said Merkel. “It wasn’t just businesspeople.”

It, in fact, became an event that brought in Door County’s extended community, the summer crowd that largely checks out by the time October rolls around. Winter Games became the weekend that many of those people came back, drawn by the promise of getting to have fun partying with their favorite Door Countyians.

“People came back up for the winter festival,” said DeGroot, “and they could see everybody else. A lot of the same people come every year. I can see people that were there 25 years ago.”

But the release from cabin fever is especially sweet for those who call Door County home and may not have time to socialize in the busy months of spring and summer.

“We’re all so busy during the tourist season, when we have free time we might not head for a place where there’s a lot of people,” said Coulson. “But in winter the thought of getting together is really appealing.”

Coulson said his favorite memory of Winter Games was a perfect winter when he took his family on the candlelight ski at Peninsula State Park, ending the night with a cup of chili over at the Bayside.

For Merkel, it’s a memory of keeping that dang tent up through the night.

“One night it was so windy we had to actually take our trucks and park them on the corners of the tent and tie them down that way,” he said. “We slept down there in our vehicles.”

The name may have changed from the Winter Games to the Fish Creek Winter Festival, the famous Cherry Pit Spit may have migrated over to Orchard Country Winery, and the tent may have moved off the ice and to the mainland, but the original spirit of the festival is still the same, said Merkel.

It’s a silly time meant to be enjoyed by the whole family, where crazy people can participate in crazy shenanigans. That’s all there is to it.

“We wanted something where it doesn’t matter if you’re five years old or 65. That’s basically what we built the thing on,” he said. “And people just ate that stuff up. The silliest stuff.”

For info on this year’s Fish Creek Winter Festival activities, click here.