World Ice Carving Championships... March 1998

Fairbanks, Alaska

The World Ice Carving Championships are held here in Fairbanks, Alaska every year in March. Ice Carving teams from all over the world come to Fairbanks and create beautiful sculptures out of huge blocks of ice. The blocks of ice are 4ft x 4ftx 8ft each, and several blocks are grouped together to make the sculptures..

Here first.. I want you to see a picture of one of the blocks with light shining through it, so you can see how clear it is.. The second picture is of the same block of ice with my daughter who is 5'6" standing in front of it so that you can see how big the ice blocks are.

The pictures turned out a little dark because it is hard to not get the glare with an instamatic flash camera.. Sorry..

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I took a lot of pictures of the different sculptures..and there were about 50 entries this year, but not all turned out.. I tried to pick some of the best to put here so you can see how awesome this stuff can be. Enjoy.

Here is a bear holding a salmon and a whale tail

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This one was called Tinkerbell, but I think of it as a petalwing...

These two show a woman pouring from a jug of water with a child watching and fire..

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This next one is one of my very favorites.. The picture is a little dark because the height of the sculpture limited the amount of ground lighting that was effective for it. This sculpture shows three Orca (killer whales).. two diving with noses down and tails at the waterline (15 feet in the air). The third whale is swimming below and across between them. Above the waterline, on the left, a man in a boat rests atop the whale's tail, and on the right, the whale's tail is still visible above the water surface. Around the area allotted the sculpture are whale tails.

This one is a sunrise over the ocean, sculpted by a Japanese team.

Here we have a "pipeline curl" wave and deep in the middle a surfer.... Also a frog with two mermaids

All pictures �Wicazo Sa writings 1998

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