Chicago ? The snowshoes are in the closet, ice fishermen are lingering at the sides of slushy lakes, and at least one snow sculpting event was, quite literally, a washout.

Unseasonably warm weather and a lack of snow in parts of the country that usually are covered in white this time of year have wreaked havoc with winter recreation events.

Temperatures as high as 50 degrees around Chicago – where it is usually closer to 30 in January – forced the postponement of Fran Volz’s popular Snow Visions sculpting contest in suburban Schaumburg this coming weekend. He rescheduled for Feb. 11.

“When we were shooting the snow gun, all that came down was water,” Volz said. “We just had water all over the parking lot.”

Organizers of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race in Alaska and Canada may have to send the race participants on a detour or give them a lift by truck for only the third time in the event’s 23-year history.

A snowman stands about 20 feet tall in Moorhead, Minn. Recent balmy weather has precipitated a rash of similar creations all over the metro area. Across the upper Midwest, the warm winter is ruining winter activities.

“There’s definitely not as much snow as we would like for the race,” said media coordinator Jennifer Gavin. The 1,000-mile race runs from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon, in Canada.

The cold weather season got off to a robust start, with low temperatures and heavy snowstorms across the country in late November and early December. But because of the warm weather of late, the snow did not stick around.

“The general weather conditions have pretty much done a flip-flop,” said Tom Niziol, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Buffalo, N.Y. “Typically, we’d have a foot and a half to two feet of snow in some of our snowbelt areas, and we’re essentially seeing no snow cover across the western part of New York state, and that is exceptional this time of year.”