Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
— 46 —
Some Say in Ice
TURN RIGHT OUT OF
of the three-story lighthouse, walk between the ice cream cones
topped with cherries and pass beneath the candy canes, and one of the first things you see is
Hansel and Gretel's cabin complete with witch. This witch has a cutout where her face
should be, so that people can have their pictures taken in it. “I want to be the witch, Mom!”
a little girl says, and shortly she is clutching the sides of the ice witch with her purple mit-
tens and peering out of the witch's face as cameras click. I have to say she doesn't look like
much of a threat to Hansel and Gretel, standing a few feet away.
What makes this Kiddie Land different from the one at any other theme park is that this
witch is carved from ice. So is her cottage, and her cauldron, and Hansel and Gretel, and
the lighthouse and the ice cream cones and everything else I'm writing about in this
column.
My friend Rhonda Sleighter and I are in Fairbanks at the Ice Park, a large, fenced
wooded area where for the next month forty amateur and professional ice carvers will vie
with one another to carve realistic, abstract and fantastical figures out of three-by-five-by-
eight foot blocks of ice. It began seventy years ago with the carving of an ice throne for
winter festival royalty, was formally institutionalized as the World Ice Art Championships
in 1992, and today, Kiddie Land is just for starters. Let's take a walk down Goosebump
Path, shall we?
Truck driver and metalsmith Gina Eaton has been competing since 1993, and is this
sunny Friday afternoon is working on a veiled, draped and folded feminine figure titled
“It's How You Wrap It.” Helping her with the heavy lifting is Craig Araquistain, in real life
a Fairbanks laborer, bone carver and commercial fisherman. “Anything to support the
habit,” he says with a wave at their sculpture.
