Chaffee County's Ice Rink Finally Has Ice. It Isn't Where Anyone Expected.

Ask a longtime Buena Vista resident where the town's ice rink is, and most will point you to two places: a storage bay at Public Works, and a gravel lot near the pump track that the town set aside for skating years ago and never built on. Ask that same question this month, and the honest answer has moved about forty minutes south, to a parking lot beside a soccer field in Salida.

That gap between where the rink was supposed to be and where the ice actually is turns out to be the real story. Chaffee County residents have told recreation surveys for over a decade that they want a rink. Buena Vista went further than most towns ever do: it actually bought one. It just never got plugged in.

A rink that already exists, sitting in a warehouse

In the mid-2010s, Buena Vista partnered with local resident Dan Hamm to buy what's known around town as the Miracle Rink, the practice rink once used by the 1980 U.S. Olympic men's hockey team before it beat the Soviet Union in Lake Placid. It has sat in storage at BV Public Works ever since, according to reporting in the Chaffee County Times. The town later set aside a parcel called Paul's Lot, just east of the pump track by the Community Center, as a future ice rink site.

Mark Hammer, vice president of the nonprofit now leading the county's ice efforts, described that outcome plainly to the Times back in 2023: the town bought the rink with the idea of using it eventually, and dedicating Paul's Lot was, in his words, "pretty much the end of the Buena Vista effort." That's not a criticism of the town. Ice rinks compete against roads, water systems, and every other line item a small municipality has to weigh. But it means the county's most complete set of rink equipment, boards, a chiller, bleachers, and a scoreboard salvaged from Colorado College's Honnen Arena, has spent years boxed up while residents kept asking when it would show up somewhere they could skate on it.

Where the momentum actually went

The group behind both efforts is Ice Rink for Chaffee County, formed when Buena Vista's Miracle Rink of the Rockies merged with Salida's Chaffee County Amateur Hockey Association. By 2023, the organization had shifted its attention south. Salida, the group told the Times, was "closest to being ready," with a proposal for Marvin Park, where the baseball fields sit. In a Salida recreation survey conducted around that time, an ice rink ranked second among community priorities, drawing support from 39 percent of respondents, enough to move it up the town's own recreation list.

The Marvin Park proposal wasn't ultimately what broke ground. IRCC instead built its first refrigerated ice sheet at Oswald Park on Holman Avenue, in the space between the parking lot and the soccer field, according to a January 2026 report in the Mountain Mail. The project ran on private funding with a budget of $250,000, and crews were on site almost daily for months to get it finished before the end of January.

It worked better than a lot of people probably expected from a seasonal rink at 7,000 feet in a high-desert valley. By early March, the ice was still holding through daytime highs in the 60s, and IRCC didn't power the system down until March 10, once the season had clearly run its course. That's not a small detail if you've ever wondered whether outdoor refrigerated ice can survive a Colorado spring warm spell this far from the mountains that usually keep snow around longest.

The comparison isn't about one town beating another. It's that the county ended up with usable ice by way of a private investor group willing to lease ground and write a check, not by way of the town that had actually owned rink equipment the longest.

What's still ahead, and what isn't

IRCC isn't stopping at a seasonal sheet in a parking lot. In May 2025, the organization announced it had secured a lease in Salida's Smeltertown neighborhood, backed by investors operating as Arkansas Valley Sports Group LLC, for what it describes as a permanent, multi-use facility. According to the nonprofit's own project goals, phase one, a refrigeration and Zamboni operations wing paired with a competition-grade outdoor ice surface, is targeted for completion this year, with a roofed, enclosed phase two planned for 2029. Grant applications are still in progress, and the group has said it's gotten encouraging responses from potential funders without announcing full funding yet.

None of that changes what's true in Buena Vista right now. The Miracle Rink is still in a warehouse. Paul's Lot is still open ground. If a Buena Vista build ever happens, it will likely follow the same private-investment path that got Oswald Park built, rather than waiting on a town budget cycle.

For this coming season, IRCC struck a hopeful note. After the Oswald Park test run wrapped up in early March, the organization shared this from its president:

"We very much look forward to next season's grand opening to finally bring reliable, refrigerated ice to Chaffee County. I'm proud of our dedicated and resilient team. The rink is a great benefit to our community and a tremendous asset for our hockey and skating programs."

That "next season" is the one starting now.

Before you show up with skates

• Schedules for public skating, hockey practice, and school events at Oswald Park are posted through IRCC's own social channels and website, not through either town's parks department.
• The rink is seasonal and weather-dependent. Last year's run held through early March, but exact opening and closing dates shift with temperature each winter.
• Buena Vista residents shouldn't expect a comparable rink in town this season. Paul's Lot remains undeveloped and the Miracle Rink remains in storage, with no announced timeline to change that.
• The Smeltertown project is still in the funding stage. There's no confirmed public opening date for the permanent facility as of this fall.

Before Oswald Park existed, the county's hockey players made do with whatever ice they could find. Youth and adult teams skated pickup games on Chalk Lake, weather permitting, which is part of why the demand for something reliable never went away even as the Miracle Rink sat unused a few miles down the road.

Why this is worth knowing if you live here

The real lesson in this story isn't about hockey. It's about how a small mountain county actually gets a piece of shared infrastructure built: not necessarily through the town that owns the land or the equipment, but through whichever group is willing to lease a lot, fund it privately, and keep crews working through a Colorado winter. Buena Vista has the rink. Salida has the ice. If you've spent the last few winters wondering when this project would finally happen, you now know exactly where to look, and exactly why it ended up somewhere other than where the town first put its money.

If you're settling into the valley and want a read on which parts of Buena Vista or Chaffee County actually fit the way you live day to day, from proximity to Main Street to how quiet a street really is once the rafting crowds thin out, Julie Kersting and the Kersting Team know this ground well enough to help you figure that out.