The Pine River area is fish house central

Four fish house manufacturers bring skilled manufacturing jobs to the area

opened a larger facility partnered with Voyager Outdoors north of Pine River in April 2019.

• Polar Fox Outdoors began producing skid houses in the fall of 2022.

It’s unlikely that anyone anticipated the small city and surrounding area becoming fish house central in the years that followed with not just one, but three additional companies coming to the area. Nor thern Sales officially opened in September of 2015.

• Blackline Conversions began finishing Yeti Fish Houses in Backus in 2015 and

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The over 50-year-old Scamp Trailer Company in Backus added a new ice fishing specific model to their product line around 2023. After all, Pine River is in the center of some of the best ice fishing on the planet with Leech Lake to the north, the Whitefish Chain to the east and the Gull Chain of Lakes to the south. Perhaps it was only natural that high-end fish house manufacturers should congregate in

FISH HOUSES: H42

Totally different career path I graduated from Brainerd High School in 1978 and always wanted to go to college to become a physical education/health teacher and a coach. I set out to St. Cloud State for one year and really got caught up in the “partying” atmosphere. My parents weren’t too happy so they cut me off financially and told me if I wanted to get a college degree, it would be all on me. I transferred to Brainerd Community College (that’s what it was called back in the day) and went there for two years. After my two year AA degree, I transferred to Bemidji State University, where I went lines and built-in furniture make for a different style of very high-end trailers that have kept since 1971.

Micah Eveland

this community.

“It’s a prime location with the type of person that lives here,” said Micah Eveland, Scamp president and partial owner at Blackline Conversions. “There are very skilled workers, very handy, but it’s also great because of the chains of lakes around us. We’re also partway to Red Lake, partway to Winnibigoshish and partway to Lake of the Woods.”

“All of a sudden you have people coming together with creative ideas and design ideas for these product lines and when we look at how we’re building products, we are building them with the user’s need in mind,” Polar Fox Outdoors Co-owner Chris Beberg said. “So when we employ people who use these products and are familiar with them and have spent a lifetime in the area fishing and camping and hunting, it helps with product development.”

While they all share a market, they all participate in that market in different ways. Their companies have their own strengths and features.

From the start, Ice Castle has marketed itself as infinitely customizable.

“We are a specialty company,” said Gregory Poncelet, with Northern Sales and Manufacturing, which makes Ice Castles. “If we can get it to fit on the frame and in our framework, we’ll build it for you. One thing everybody knows with Ice Castle is that we do customization. We will do whatever the customer wants, to a certain extent. We sit down with the customer one on one and do a plan and measurements.”

Ice Castle uses steel frames and 2-by-3 stud walls, cedar and pine and now cabinet stain.

Since arriving on the scene, Yeti has boasted an impressive extruded aluminum frame that appeals to many for its reduced weight.

“They’re all-aluminum fish houses so nothing in them will rot,” Eveland said. “These are premium as far as being engineered. They have hydraulic lift systems or manual crank systems and they are industry-leading, for sure.”

Polar Fox filled a different niche with extremely lightweight skid houses.

“Everyone has some degree of, ‘Hey, we make a trailer for fishing that can drop down and you can fish in,’” said Beberg. “But some of them are more RV focused and some are just more ice fishing focused. The difference is really about materials and construction, which are chosen based on the needs and goals of my customers.”

Polar Fox houses are made from panels that combine insulation and rigid finishing materials into single panels, eliminating the need for extra wood framing that would make their shelters heavier. History alone is enough to make Scamp stand out. Scamp brought with them many years of experience and a customer base so loyal that in 2022 they started a homecoming rally for Scamp owners.

“We started in 1971, building fiberglass units,” Eveland said. “The one thing that stuck was the Scamp Travel Trailer and we’ve been manufacturing those ever since. We’re a very niche market. We make a molded fiberglass travel trailer and we’re one of the ones that’s been around the longest. Volume speaks for itself; the more you see out there, the more people are comfortable with purchasing that brand.”

Of course, the industry has grown with Scamp’s introduction of an ice fishing specific line of Ice Pro camper fish houses. The new product, introduced just over a year ago, uses the company’s experience in fiberglass shells, but applies it in a different shape.

“We’re always looking for new and exciting things,” Eveland said. “About a year and a half ago we started the Ice Pro project. We wanted to compete and created a very lightweight fish house. We also stayed in the same category of molded fiberglass since there’s not a molded fiberglass fish house out there right now, and our engineering team came together on our new design and landed on the shape you see today.”

The new Ice Pro line features lightweight toy haulers. An angler can haul the house with a four wheeler inside to the shore of the lake, unload the four wheeler, attach the trailer to the all-terrain vehicle and tow it to the lake, leaving their vehicle parked on shore.

They also come equipped with all expected furniture and amenities.

The competition has grown over the years. Polar Fox, for example, has begun to ramp up production of their toy hauler trailer models in the face of increased market demand.

“We’ve brought in more wheelhouse systems into what we call an all-season trailer,” Beberg said. “They are a lifelong product with an ice fishing layout, then we add a bit of RV camping features.”

The Polar Fox wheel houses come with openings and space to allow ATVs to be hauled inside.

As their production plants grow in age, Ice Castle and Blackline Conversion’s Yeti Fish Houses continue to g row in quality. At Northern Sales, for example, they have begun building narrower houses that are more suitable to be pulled behind a utility vehicle. They are also shifting designs toward camper friendliness.

“People like seasonal campers,” Poncelet said.

While the area population isn’t too incredibly big by manufacturing standards, it turns out these companies think “this town” is in fact big enough for the four of them, and the competition is a boon for the industry.

Any time you get competition, you’re going to get a better product for the consumer,” Eveland said. “We all keep moving and keep raising the bar and get a better product for our consumers in this area and in the nation.”

“I think anytime you bring people doing the same thing into a community it turns out not to be a competition, but some sort of camaraderie,” Beberg said. “It kind of creates energy for everybody, and that’s a lot of fun. It brings benefits to everyone.”

As the first to delve into local fish house manufacturing, the people at Northern Sales also feel the advantage of working near others in the same industry.

“Anyone that starts something in a location should feel honored when other people follow suit in the area. As far as a business aspect, it’s very smart to have more manufacturing in one area,” Poncelet said. “A better workforce. If they don’t like working for us, they can go some place else. If they don’t like working for that company, they can come back to us. But the more you give to one community, the more options, the more people it brings here and brings out of Minneapolis.”

TRAVIS GRIMLER is a staff writer for the Pineandlakes Echo Journal weekly newspaper in Pequot Lakes/Pine River. He may be reached at 218-855-5853 or travis.grimler@pineandlakes.com.