In 2018, a team of enthusiastic individuals from Excelsior in the western suburbs of Minneapolis  set out to resurrect a rather unique winter event that takes full advantage of the predictably cold and snowy Minnesota winter climate.  What the organizing committee couldn't have predicted was that by 2023, tens of thousands of spectators would line the streets for the start of the event and local sponsorships would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other thing they couldn't have predicted was that in 2024, Minnesota would experience an historically warm winter.