The town of Wadena straddles State Highway 71 running north to south through the town and US Highway 10 running east to west.  The town is two plus miles long.  At some points along the two miles, it is less than a mile in wide.

On a warm June evening day four years ago, some ominous clouds started to develop in the plains south southwest of Wadena.  A single tornado core was formed with multiple smaller tornado tubes dancing around the core.  Combined, it became an EF4 tornado with winds of 170 miles/per hour.  The tornado was 1.1 miles wide at times and easily engulfed stretches of Wadena from west to east as it traveled 10 miles along the ground through the southwest and west of Wadena before it left the earth.

The tornado destroyed whole sections of the town in the 15 minutes it took to travel those 10 miles.  It damaged the high school; it destroyed 200 buildings; and it destroyed the ice arena and community center.  By 5:15 that evening, it left the town of 4,000 in ruins and hockey equipment scattered up to 15 miles from the ice arena.  

But the Wadena Hockey Club and its supporters rallied.  For years in Northern Minnesota, people in small towns had built their way into their own house by building the house a piece at a time.  Coming out of the depression, they avoided bank loans by doing so.  Often the key step was when a home owner to be capped the basement and could move in thus living in the home's basement for a few years while accumulating the funds to complete the build.  In this whole process, much of the manual labor was down by the family.  

From the fall of 2010 to the fall of 2013, the Wadena Hockey Club and its supporters, put a strategy together that would serve the local association’s youth programs and varsity programs.  With the city put a building moratorium for at least year on a new ice arena in the summer of 2010, the Wadena Hockey Club, a Minnesota Hockey Association in District 15, knew it would struggle to maintain a youth program faced with outdoor ice and long drives to practice on indoor ice especially when hockey season would officially start in November only five months after tornado touchdown.

The hockey club planned to build their way in, just as home owners had down before.  They couldn’t “cap the basement” until the fall of 2011.  For the 2010-2011 season, the club turned the old arena’s indoor ice into an outdoor rink.  Outside that season, the Wadena winter was warm.  It was shirtsleeve weather for the deer hunters.  November temperatures averaged above 32 degrees.

Fortunately, the concrete slab, compressor and Zamboni all survived the tornado, but the club created the outdoor ice by adding boards and glass in part sent by neightboring associations.  A temporary scoreboard was donated along with temporary dressing rooms and facilities.  Initially, the high school used Long Prairie’s arena for home ice in 2010-2011, driving an hour one way for practices and games.  Long Prairie and other communities had stepped in and offered ice to the Wolverines.

In early December, the new outdoor facility opened.  The high school made a decision at that time to use the outdoor rink for their practices and keep Long Prairie for games.  They still had to struggle to schedule home varsity games and the varsity and youth programs lost significant numbers as players quit rather than play outside or moved to other programs.  Temperatures fell to average of 15 degrees and held there for January and February 2011, but shot up to around 32 degrees in March.  Playing outdoor hockey in those conditions is great is the ice does not get soft.  The Wolverine’s varsity managed to get two home games played on outdoor ice in February posting a 4-21 record playing in the Mid-State Conference for the 2010-2011 season. 

In 2011-2012, the hockey locals got the arena’s four walls up.  They “capped the basement”.  Still using portable facilities and dressing room, the association and high school played a full season inside an arena that had little heat.  The operative words were bring a thermos of something hot.  In 2012-2013, most of the arena was complete, gone were the portable facilities.  The heat was turned on.  Last season, the arena was all there.  Through it all, the Wadena Hockey Club kept its program together and the varsity played its game.  This season, both are showing signs of becoming more competitive on the ice.

This fall, the Wolverines will return 14 varsity players and will have some good players joining from the bantam ranks.  They will have depth for the first time in a few years and will be an interesting team to watch, especially playing in their new rink.

The future looks bright for Wadena and its hockey and for the town.  Today an average of more than 40 oil trains a week pass through Wadena.  For every 100 cars in the train, 72,000 barrels of oil are carried to refineries on rails (partly owned BNSF owned by Warren Buffet’s company).  Three million barrels equals one day of production by Iraq or the United Arab Emirates or Venezuela or Mexico or Kuwait or etc.).  In 2-3 years, oil shipped through Wadena will make the USA the largest producer of oil in the world.

Wadena is a community that comes together on its own terms and deals with its problems without looking for outside help.  It is encouraging to see that spirit.  Equallin encouraging is the other communities around Wadena stepped in and offered help to sort out immediate problems.  The people in West Central Minnesota just do it, nobody talks about it.  Their town's future is bright because of it.  Go Wolves.     

Note: This post is dedicated to Charles White.  Charles who lived all 75 years of his life in the Wadena area passed away this past Thursday.  He died working on the farm he grew up on.   Charlie was a straight forward person that told you his mind, believed in God, and thought youth hockey was frivolous.  But he was a passionate deer hunting partner so it never bothered this corner of YHH.  Both Charles and Wadena reflect community, not as politicians define it, but as it is lived.

Charles used to grouse about the new Wadena arena as a waste of time and money while walking to the deer stands or after a hot meal on a chilly November evening ignoring the fact that he had two great grandkids playing the sport.  He will be missed, especially in the fall.  His favorite stand will be vacant after 50 years.  He will not be hunting on his favorite forty.  His passing is a loss to the Wadena area.  Such is Minnesota hockey.