The La Crosse Tribune report quotes Tomah Parks and Recreation director Joe Protz on the first weekend of February: "This is kind of the cold, dreary part of the winter season." The holidays are packed up. Spring thaw is still two months out. Nothing on the town calendar fills that gap on its own, so about a decade and a half ago, the Tomah Rotary Club and the city's Parks and Recreation Department built something to fill it themselves. They called it Freeze Fest, and every year since, it has run on the same currency: a paper button that costs one dollar.
If you've lived in Tomah through a few Februarys, you already know the button exists. What's easy to miss is what the button actually maps onto. Look at the list of places that take it, and you're looking at a rough inventory of every business and public facility in the area built to keep running when the temperature drops and daylight shrinks to nine hours. That's not a coincidence. It's the design.
Why This Particular Week
Tomah's calendar has an obvious rhythm the rest of the year. The Budweiser Dairyland Super National Truck & Tractor Pull draws a crowd. The Monroe County Fair fills the summer. The Cranberry Festival next door in Warrens closes out September. Between New Year's and the first hint of spring, there's nothing anchoring the town, and that's exactly the stretch Freeze Fest was built to occupy. Protz and Rotary organizers have said as much directly: the goal is to get people out of the house during the part of winter with no other pull.
The event has run long enough to prove the idea works. A La Crosse Tribune report from January 2020 covered the 10th annual Freeze Fest, which puts the festival's start somewhere around 2010 or 2011. By 2026, that's more than fifteen years of the same partnership between a civic club and a city department, refining the same week every winter.
The Button Itself
The mechanics haven't changed much. A Freeze Fest button costs a dollar, sold in advance at Tomah City Hall, the Tomah Chamber and Visitors Center, and the Kupper Ratsch Senior Center. Wearing one gets you into most of the week's events for free or at a discount. Buttons have also been sold through a rotating list of downtown sponsors over the years, including CliftonLarsonAllen, Edward Jones, F&M Bank, Ground Round Restaurant, Gray Electric, State Farm Insurance, the Tomah Journal, Timberwood Bank, and Walmart. A local kid designs the artwork each year through a Rotary-run contest, with Gray Electric funding the cash prizes for winners.
The week opens with a medallion hunt. Clues drop daily on the Tomah Rotary Club's Facebook page, and whoever finds the hidden medallion first walks away with $300 in Tomah Bucks, redeemable at local businesses. It's a low-stakes scavenger hunt that gets people checking a Facebook feed and thinking about downtown Tomah every day for most of a week before the weekend events even start.
Where the Cold Doesn't Actually Stop Anything
Here's the part worth paying attention to if you live here. When Freeze Fest expanded its footprint for its 10th year, it didn't add another outdoor activity. It added Three Bears Lodge in Warrens and Fort McCoy's Whitetail Ridge Ski Area, specifically because both operate independent of the weather that day. Whitetail Ridge makes its own snow. Three Bears runs an indoor water park that doesn't care if it's fifteen degrees outside. Protz framed the expansion in exactly those terms: getting people into places that aren't so weather dependent.
That single decision turns the Freeze Fest partner list into something closer to a directory of winter-proof recreation options in and around Tomah. A partial rundown of what a button has gotten people over the years:
- Half-price entry to the indoor water park at Three Bears Lodge in Warrens
- Half-price all-day ski passes at Fort McCoy's Whitetail Ridge Ski Area
- Free shoe rental at Strike Zone of Tomah
- Half-price admission at Flying Wheels Roller Rink during set evening hours
- Free or discounted open skate at the Tomah Ice Center
- Bingo and euchre at the Kupper Ratsch Senior Center
None of these are seasonal pop-ups. They offer winter activities in and around Tomah, and Freeze Fest has given people a chance to try some of them with a button over the years.
The Weekend Itself
Most of the outdoor programming happens on Friday and Saturday. Cross-country skiing and snowshoeing on Lake Tomah has been a fixture for years, often billed as "Swish Across the Lake," a round-trip route between parks marked by torches along the way. On at least one recent year, the ski and snowshoe night ended with a sky lantern release over the lake, with lanterns available for five dollars each and Tomah Health volunteers on hand to help beginners with borrowed gear.
Saturday tends to bring the widest mix. A chili cook-off has run through the Rotary Club for years, with a ten-dollar ticket covering chili samples and a drink, and the proceeds benefiting Family Promise of Monroe County. Voting happens by dropping cash into a jar next to each entry, with both a People's Choice and a Judge's award on the line. Recreation Park has hosted a bounce house for kids, live music in past years from acts like Gary's Ridgeland Dutchmen, and games aimed at everyone from toddlers to teenagers. More recent editions have added pickleball, a movie night, a torchlight run and walk, and a raffle for a Toro snowblower, which is either a very practical prize or a very on-brand joke depending on how your driveway looks in early February.
What This Means If You're Already Circling the Date
The Tomah Rotary Club's Freeze Fest page confirms the event still runs annually on the first weekend of February, with buttons going on sale several days ahead through the same City Hall, Chamber, and Senior Center locations. A few things worth knowing before that week rolls around again:
- Buttons aren't sold at the discount venues themselves. Buy one ahead of time at City Hall, the Chamber office, or the Senior Center, since Three Bears Lodge and Whitetail Ridge only honor buttons already in hand.
- The medallion hunt starts before the weekend does. Clues post daily on Facebook, so following the Rotary Club's page a few days early matters more than showing up Friday.
- Indoor and outdoor programming run on different clocks. The ski and snowshoe night at Winnebago Park depends on conditions holding up. The ice skating, bowling, and roller rink discounts don't.
None of this requires planning a trip. It requires knowing where the button gets you and following a Facebook page for a week. That's a low bar for a tradition that's outlasted a decade of Tomah winters, and it says something about the town that the fix for its slowest stretch was never a big new attraction. It was just making sure people knew what was already open.
Freeze Fest isn't on our calendar because we sell real estate. It's on our calendar because we live here too, and this is the week that gets Tomah through February. If you're weighing what year-round life in this part of Wisconsin actually looks like, from the cranberry harvest to the ice skating, Katie Pfaff and the team at Pfaff Properties WI are always glad to talk through it.
