Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Craig is also in charge of Kiddie Land. This year's theme is “Sugar and Spice and
Everything Ice,” which explains Hansel and Gretel but not the six or eight ice slides
which range from one that looks like a luge run to a Bernini-inspired slope with leaves
sprouting from the top. At night, with all the slides and sculptures lit up with multi-
colored lights, it is a crystalline fairyland. A fairyland designed for fun, what with the
slides and the ice rink and the twirlies.
The twirlies? Throughout Kiddie Land are scattered what look like Easter baskets
carved from ice big enough to hold a small child. Belinda Dominguez, there with her
charge Logan Beile, clears up the mystery for us—“the kids can climb inside and then you
grab the handle and twirl them.” She tries to demonstrate but overnight the basket has
frozen to the ground.
They are very popular. “I wish we had about twenty more of the twirlies,” Craig says.
“It's more about having fun than it is about the competition,” Gina says, and then ad-
mits to having a first place in the single block event. Craig, she tells us, has three gold
medals in the multi-block event.
Further down Goosebump Path sculptor Steve Brice is placing a curved dagger in the
upraised hand of an ice woman, attaching it with judicial applications from a syringe full
of water. “He has to do it real slow otherwise it will pop,” says co-carver Heather Brown
of Fairbanks.
“Like ice cubes expanding to fit the trays,” I say and she nods and smiles. I ask what
their day jobs are and they laugh and point at the sculpture. “This.” Steve and Heather are
professional ice carvers year round and around the world, from Europe to Japan to the Salt
Lake City Olympics. Steve has a gold medal in the multiblock competition, and ten
medals total.
The carvers' tools range from electric drills, sanders, die grinders, rasps and chisels to
chain saws, slow cookers, and irons, among many other things. Water in heated barrels
stands ready to wash down surfaces and mend cracks and assemble various parts, and
since they've only got 72 hours to finish the sculptures in the single block contest, mobile
lights on long electric cords illuminate the sculptures day and night.
There is what appears to be a banquet table with Southeastern totemic legs accompan-
ied by what we think is an anti-submarine mine. There is an ice man riding what looks
