2018 Breckenridge Snow Sculptures

If it's January in Colorado, you know that the International Snow Sculptures will be coming up soon.  We always look forward to a day in the mountains, in one of our favorite mountain towns and looking at these incredible snow sculptures.

We spent nearly 3 hours making the hour and forty-five minute drive up the mountain because there were not one, not two but three major accidents on the West-bound lanes and it made all of the traffic slow to a crawl.  So by the time we arrived in Breckenridge we were starving.  Good thing there are lots and lots of yummy places to eat!  After a quick meal we headed out to see the show.

And once again the sculptures didn't disappoint!

2018 Ice Castle

Mark:  What are we doing this weekend?
Me: Playing Frozen.
Mark: Playing what?
Me: Frozen.
Mark: *deep sigh*

He thought I was kidding! But I actually found an ice castle for us to go to that would have made Elsa and Olga (or whatever the Frozen movie character's names are) very proud! We went to an actual Ice Castle in Dillon, Colorado.

 

 I got tickets for us to go through it in the late afternoon so that we could see the place in natural light and then we could see the place with all of the colorful lights after dark.

This place is really neat.  The Ice Castle is made by hand and they add over 10,000 icicles to the creation every day.  They have other castles in several other places; Utah, Minnesota, Alberta Canada, New Hampshire and Winnipeg, Manitoba.  This thing was pretty massive. The Ice Castle weighs about 25,000,000 pounds and the walls are about 10 feet thick, so its pretty heavy and strong! There are small caves that only little kids can climb into, dancing water features, slides for big kids and little kids, passageways that lead from one room to another, long hallways that have thousands of icicles hanging down from overhead, rooms with ice windows in them and 25-30 feet towers that enclose the whole castle.  

Windows in the walls

The ceiling in one of the passageways

 

 

                                                         Mark going down the ice slide

The ice during the day was naturally a beautiful ice-blue color but as the sun went down the castle looked completely different with the multi-colored lights that they had placed deep within the walls of the structure.