our entry in the competition told of a lake monster, “Louie,” who would attack unsuspecting ice fishermen.
updated 8/17/23, with corrections, retitling, other tweaks, and seo
Ice Magic in the mountains of Canada
This was my first experience carving ice outside the U.S. It was the winter of 1995-96. I went with Scott Nagel and his wife Kerry to the Ice Magic event at the Chateau Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada (I believe it’s within Banff National Forest.) You carve right by a lake that sits below a mountain with a glacier on top. Pretty hard to beat that for scenery. The hotel was also top notch when we were there.
When we competed, you were given 15 blocks of can ice (with light cores) and about two and a half days to cut with three people allowed per team. For our design, we had a lake monster breaking up through the ice attacking an ice fisherman. We wrote a story to go along with our piece, claiming that the lake monster was named “Louie” and that he resided in Lake Louise and periodically attacked ignorant and unfortunate ice fishermen. The sculpture was titled: “The Legend of Louie.” (How many times do you think that Louie could get a meal before word got around?)
The days while we were there were bright and clear, but brutally cold at twenty degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) most of the time. The plastic on the cord of my heat gun cracked right off when I unwrapped it and angle grinders would frequently freeze up. Welding ice was difficult because even near freezing water was over fifty degrees warmer than the ice, so the ice would fracture almost every time.
Also, the water froze so fast that it wouldn’t flow into seams very well, meaning that the center of the weld would be unfrozen. We tried to get around this by exposing the weld and pouring water in, but the water would often freeze before we could put the ice pieces back together. Unfortunately for us, I had designed a sculpture that required a LOT of welds. Worse than that, at one point, I tried to “test” the welds by pushing on our sculpture. It failed the test and fell over. We didn’t make a whole lot of progress on the first day.
On the second day, Scott and I disagreed on a number of things. I didn’t have much experience competing in team events, so I suppose I was having trouble adapting my ideas to the needs of the team. Scott and I were both used to working on our own, so working together was sometimes challenging. Also, the extreme cold didn’t make things easy either. We had to take frequent breaks to warm up or deal with cold-related problems. In the end, we had a decent sculpture, but it wasn’t everything we had envisioned.
this amazing ice sculpture, by Junichi Nakamura and his teammate, stood atop a single supporting pillar that leaned at an angle.
Before my first trip to Ice Magic, I had no idea who Junichi Nakamura was. Chuck Wagner, who was organizing the event, brought him over from Japan to carve. Junichi and his partner carved an angel with a sword up on two supporting pillars. At the time, it was titled “Soldier” (Junichi later retitled the design) and it was quickly clear that it was the best sculpture at the competition.
However, near the end of the competition, word went around that Junichi was going to cut away one of the pillars so that the sculpture would only stand on one (which was clearly tilted.) My first thought was that he was crazy and that we would surely finish one place higher after his sculpture collapsed. But it stood and it was amazing! I think it scored a NICA 99. Below you can see my attempt at getting a good night shot of it.
It wasn’t a surprise that Junichi’s sculpture was the winner. What surprised us was that we won People’s Choice. Because we had wasted a lot of time on the first day and had had more troubles later, we had assumed that we wouldn’t win anything. But you never, ever know how things are going to turn out until the awards are announced.
We would have liked to place, but we had tried to connect with the spectators and the area with our piece, and winning People’s Choice told us that we’d succeeded. It also didn’t hurt that our carving area was right in front of one of the huge picture windows in the Chateau Lake Louise and that we’d picked a silly name for our team: “Two Dudes and a Babe.” The final irony was the prize that we won for People’s Choice: warm, oversized coats! We could have used those a few days earlier I think.
I understand that Scott has been back to Ice Magic several times since. (Not too long after we competed together, he moved to Montana and we’ve only had occasional contact through facebook.) I’ve been back as well, but that’s a story for another time. Lake Louise is a spectacularly beautiful place to have an ice sculpting competition!
links and stuff
You could also find photos and info from this entry on the ice sculpting secrets Instagram account or the facebook page. You can comment there as well as below. And if it won’t LET you comment below, then definitely comment on fb and/or IG. Thanks!
