Over the past week we’ve been blown away by how many great entries we have gotten for our first annual photo contest.  There were hundreds of photos on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter with the tag #Michiganicefest2015.  If you haven’t looked through them all, I would highly recommend it.  From pizza in the hot tub to remote lakeshore climbs, these entries seemed to catch every aspect of the ice fest experience.  As great as they all were, this is a contest and we had to settle in and pick a winner.

And the winner is… shoot, this is too hard to pick.  We had a handful of favorites and just couldn’t come to a consensus. So with that, we are changing the rules.  We chose our favorites as finalists and are leaving the final choice up to you.  We’re posting all of our favorites to Facebook and letting you vote.  All you have to do is go to our Facebook page and use Facebook’s “Like” feature to select your favorite photo from our album of finalists.  We’ll leave voting open until Wednesday February 18th at 7PM.  Whichever photo has the most “likes” at that point will be our winner.

And what do you get for winning?  A sweet prize of course, this is Ice Fest after all.  We are giving away a free entry to next years event as well a free class of your choice.  In addition to this, we are throwing in a pair of Petzl lazer speed ice screws!

Thanks to everyone who participated. You entered some great images and made our job pretty tough.

Below you can see all of the finalist.  Head over to our Facebook page to vote!