Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
One of my favorites is an ice tree with leaves, fruit and what might be a partridge.
Rhonda is torn between a carousel-looking affair with a kneeling woman and a cat pawing
the air with its front legs, called “Dancing with Cat,” and the ice musher driving an ice
dog team past a moose called “No Turning Back.” “Look at the lead dog's tongue,”
Rhonda says, “you expect to see something dripping off it.” The carver says, “And I did it
all with an icepick and a brush.”
One couple is finishing a velociraptor with a blowtorch and the front left leg falls off,
narrowly missing the carver. A man saws off the wooden support beneath the left knee of
an ice woman with upflowing hair held back by a King Triton tiara and jumps back
quickly in case her knee falls off and brains him. It doesn't, and he gets out a buffer to
smooth it down. Down the trail we find Steve and Heather's “Obstacles” completed, and
their knife-wielding warrior woman is revealed to be kneeling before a chest of ice doub-
loons guarded by a rearing ice cobra so lifelike I don't want to get anywhere near it.
We return the next morning along with the rest of Fairbanks, where the sun revealed
features we had missed the night before. The bamboo Snow White had a bird in her hand.
The partridge tree was shedding leaves. The standing figures wrestling turned out to be a
lion and a man, not a bear and a man. Excaliber had appeared in front of the eagle with
outspread wings. The velociraptor had its leg back on.
And down past the intersection of Frosty Lane and Goosebump Path, beyond the wall
of black hangings shielding the single-block sculptures from the sun, chainsaws were
already making the first cuts in the multiblock contest.
