Not Shoveling snow, we are shoveling sand in Phoenix!

Yes, today our next milestone took 12 hours and 24 very sore volunteers to shovel over 100 tons of wet sand for the next layer over the pipes.

This layer is much deeper, around 3 inches around and over the pipes, than the first sand layer, which was only an inch.

Too tired to write much more since it's 10:30pm at night and many of us that are left worked at our day jobs and have been shoveling since. Good night for now...

The New Arizona Pipeline

The progress of our new curling club breaks new ground...of pipe that is. It's actually laying over 6 miles of pipe for the glycol fluid that will pump through the compressor and chill the ice. It's a tedious job that take teamwork of 12-15 people to lay each row.

A connection is made between two pieces and then dragged off the wheels to lay out and be carefully lifted over the metal "chairs" (aka metal floor brackets) that were hand laid before it by 6+ volunteers.

Then the pipe is stretched and carefully place in certain parts of the chair to keep the pipe straight.  When it's ready to go, the puller at the end shouts down the "soon to be ice" to start tying it down. Index fingers and thumbs go to work pulling zip ties in unison at many designated points in the pipe and clip off any extra zip tie to make it clean.

The excess pipe is cut, glued and secured to the out flow and return flow tubes called "headers."

We streamline this process to keep it continuous, only taking breaks when new players step in or the lunch/dinner food arrives. 3 crews of people were here today from 9 am - 10 pm, totaling over 30 generous volunteers.

We will be really close to finishing another milestone tonight thanks to all of these curlers that are putting their life on hold to build this club.  What a dedicated club!

Barriers Down!

Well it's almost midnight as I write this post and there are still 8 diehards left at the club finishing up the second vapor barrier. 

After the first vapor barrier went down and 2 people taped the seams. Then had a dozen dedicated curlers get a gym like workout in laying down two layers of staggered foam. Lots of cutting for the edges.

As usual, the learning curve was steep and after a few moments of flipping foam, we all got into a groove; many of us literally since many of us developed a scooting dance to lock the foam in tight.

The best part if the night was when many of us were easily envisioning the ice with the floor so white!  Good night for now...sweet dreams filled of curling on dedicated ice in the desert!

Work Hard, Havin' Fun...More Foam, Here We Come!

Another good weekend of hard work going into the base ice layer. Boards and sand are finishing up, leading way to the monumental vapor barrier and foam!

We had some smiles and fun that comes with delirium after so many hours of hard work...check out fun loving crew at work!

Had to add a selfie!

Building our Big Kid Sandbox

The boards are up! The base layer of sand is almost tamped out and leveling the sand is well underway. Next steps will be adding the vapor barrier, insulation and then pipes. And, of course, we had some fun doing it!

Life's a beach!

We have begun the process of bringing 178 tons of sand into our facility. It's all about the base layer and 8352 feet as flat as possible. Over 20 volunteers have worked on leveling this sand with a laser.