World Ice Art Championships

Today immediately after Weston got out of school we headed for the World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks. They hold the competition here every year, and each time I have been to see it the ice sculptures have been beyond amazing. This year left me wondering how it is at all even possible??? What an amazing talent to have! Not that I want to develop it or even learn to try, no thanks, I am just saying....it is one thing to be a sculptor, but it is a whole other talent to be a sculptor out of ice. They carve in sub-freezing temperatures, use massive ladders and chainsaws for a lot of the designing, then the sculptors get in the with all sorts of different types of chissels and tools to create these ice sculptors in just a few days.
Not to mention, at the Ice Park they have an ice maze, 3 ice slides for toddlers, and probable 12 HUGE ice slides for adults and kids, ice tunnels, ice spinning games you can side on and get all sorts of dizzy with, an ice hockey rink, and other sculptors made out of ice for everyone including adults to play on. This year, they had 2 4 wheelers with 3 trailers attached for like a train for all the customers to ride on to view all of the neat art work. This was an amazing life saver! It took about 20 minutes to see all of the ice art, where as if I had walked thru with my kids it would have been close to 2 hours I'm sure.

Here is Weston absolutely delighted to be going downthe ice slide for probably the 12th time in a row. You can sort of see the chutes from some of the slides behind him. Basically you go in your snow gear and either go down on your bum or zoom down on a sled. He and Kaiden chose the sled and couldn't get enough of it!

Claire is about as pooped as she can be. Her and I went down on our bums probably 6 or 7 times before I gave up on her. As soon as I told her no more for the night, she argued for a second and then found this sled to sit on. A few minutes later I found her like this in a total daze and couldn't help but laugh. She is SO fearless, but luckily she still has a maximum when it comes to strength and energy! Whew! If you look closely you can see her newly busted cheek(she tripped and fell while holding legos and the legos won!), her busted top lip from the shopping cart earlier today and her busted bottom lip from some ice thing somewhere in the park earlier as well. Dear, oh dear, my poor little girl. It's a good thing she is so dang cute.

This was a childrens playing area. It was designed after the nursery rhyme with the woman in the shoe. This and the couple below are some of my other favs of the day!

So this is an ice tunnel made for the kids. It has several tunnels coming off of it into dead ends, but all the kids figured it out pretty fast. To make it not so closterphobic, they put nice sized face holes (peek for mommy holes) throughout. The picture oppotunities were just to cute to pass up.

Here are some of the sculptures worth sharing. Don't get me wrong, all of them are great and have seriously talented hands behind their creation, but being that the weather today was above 40 degrees, the sculptures have began melting. Also, I forgot my camera was set on it's lowest setting so I have a lot of not-so-great shots too. Bummer! Still though, even after most of the incredible details have melted away, the creation of each sculpture is SO neat!!!