Frozen Assets, a celebration of winter that raises money to improve the condition of local lakes, returns to the shores of Lake Mendota and the Edgewater Hotel on the first full weekend of February.
The annual festival and fundraiser, presented by the Clean Lakes Alliance, will be held on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 7 and 8.
Mixed in with the fun of ice skating, the only run-walk held on a (frozen) lake, and activities presented by the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Aldo Leopold Nature Center, will be an effort to build a coalition of municipalities and nonprofits to advance Renew the Blue, a community plan to improve water quality.
According to a 2025 economic study by the Clean Lakes Alliance, the Yahara lakes region — including lakes Monona, Mendota, Wingra, Waubesa and Kegonsa — annually generate more than $220 million in economic activity.
During Frozen Assets, one local lake (Mendota) hosts the family-friendly fun.
“We’re leaning into winter,” said James Tye, executive director of the Clean Lakes Alliance. “In Wisconsin, you shouldn’t be bashful about enjoying the winter outside.
“This year, Frozen Assets is truly trying to give people experiences so that they can have a touchstone on how important our lakes are to the community.”
To date, the annual fundraiser has enabled the group to award nearly $1.4 million in grants to nonprofit and municipal partners in the Yahara Watershed that work to reduce phosphorus and take other steps — including water quality monitoring — that improve conditions in the watershed.
To raise money, Frozen Assets offers a lineup that includes perennial favorites such as Kites on Mendota with the Wisconsin Kiter’s Club, skydiving jumps over the lake with the Seven Hills Skydivers, a 5K run/walk on Lake Mendota, and free ice skating on the Edgewater’s ice rink.
For those who might be reluctant to exercise on a lake, Tye said he can guarantee the lake will be frozen over “as much as I can guarantee the sun will come up tomorrow.”
The run/walk begins on the Lake Mendota shore at the Edgewater, proceeds directly to the UW Memorial Union, then straight out to Picnic Point — “Sort of a dog leg-shaped route,” Tye said — before looping around and coming back the same way.
Tye said festival organizers are still looking for volunteers, “and we are also looking for people to do the run/walk because anybody can walk on the lake. You don’t have to be fast. You can be steady and slow, and you can enjoy it also.”
For the first time, those who register for the run/walk will receive a Frozen Assets stocking hat.
The Ho-Chunk Nation’s snow snake, a popular feature introduced last year, returns this year. It’s a traditional game played during the winter by Wisconsin tribes, and it involves launching a handcrafted, wooden stick (the snake) down a long icy trough in the snow to see who can make the snake travel the greatest distance.
“We’re expanding the snow snake because last year we had a line of people the entire day that were curious about it,” Tye said, “so we’re going to make that a bigger opportunity this year.”
Several events and activities will take place inside the Edgewater, including winter craft stations, ecological movie showings and other presentations in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom.
Collective effort
When Renew the Blue was published in 2023, it was signed by 19 organizations, including local units of government and nonprofits. That number has grown to 35. In the days prior to Frozen Assets, the Clean Lakes Alliance hopes to expand the group of organizations involved in the Renew the Blue Council to work more cohesively and track the group’s collective implementation of sustainable practices, Tye said.
County Executive Melissa Agard and local mayors have been invited to attend the Feb. 4 Frozen Assets Happy Hour Summit at which the potential expansion will be promoted.
“The greater Yahara chain of (five) lakes has 21 municipalities plus all these nonprofits, and so there’s a lot of synergies that we are going to build,” Tye said. “For example, the Southwest Bird Alliance (formerly Madison Audubon) has joined the effort. The villages of McFarland and Windsor through their village boards have joined the effort.”
Tye said while the water quality in the lakes goes up and down based on temperature and how much rain falls every season, the alliance will track the collective efforts of the changes on land that also affect water quality.
“We’re going to come up with five metrics that track all the projects that are being done on the land so that we can more accurately predict our collective impact,” he said.
According to Tye, nobody can tell him how much parkland — local or state — is in conservation status. He said the alliance can’t establish those metrics until it knows this information, and it has partnered with the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission to create a database “so that we can track our projects on land.”
There are a number of practices that happen on land that are reflected in the quality of local bodies of water, he said.
“One example could be building 10,000 rain gardens,” Tye said. “Another example is to increase the number of acres that have a conservation practice on them — and not just doing so in isolation in the town of Westport but more holistically across municipalities and different nonprofits.”
