Absolutely, conditions depending of course. It's not as reliable as it was 50 years ago or whatever, but if you show up for a week between mid January and mid February, you can usually bank on it. Minneapolis has one of the best park systems in the country, so you're usually not that far from a park no matter where you are, and it feels like most of them will flood a huge area and put up boards up. And they maintain it too, which is awesome (clear the snow, re-flood it periodically, and so on). Most of them have warming houses too, once the ice is reliable. Maybe bookmark the parks and rec website in case you plan on coming by:
Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board . Oh also, the nearby Saint Louis Park rec center has a sheet of outdoor ice with a roof over it that *I think* has refrigeration as well for good measure (I know guys who have played on it when it was like 40 degrees out). But yeah. One of my family's fond memories from this past winter was definitely heading down the road 2 minutes or whatever to the local park and skating around with my toddler son and meeting a family who were visiting from Texas for a hockey tournament, and were beside themselves over the fact that outdoor ice was even a thing
My wife chatted with the mom for a bit until the parents didn't want to be outside anymore
Oh by the way, even if it gets infuriatingly warm and the ice is too sloppy, you can still find pickup hockey pretty much every day in one of the billion or so indoor rinks in the Twin Cities. Check out
www.jmshockey.com for pickup options. You sign up, fill out a questionnaire about your background, and you get a level to play at, basically from "novice" to "used to play Canadian juniors"
