World Ice Championships

Fairbanks has the best ice for ice sculpting in the world.  I don't know the details but I believe it's something about it being so clear and forming in large blocks.  There are three divisions - Single block classic - Multi block classic - Fairbanks open.  The single block 5' x 8' x 3' and weighs 7800 pounds and the multi blocks are 4' x 4' x 3' and they're given 12 of them and can use heavy machinery and some turn out over 20 feet high and weight over 20 tons.

Anyway, we went yesterday - it's pretty much the end of the competition and I took some pictures (there are probably 4 times as many sculptures - I tried not to take too many.  A lot of them had melted or broken too as it's been warming up this past week.

I was pretty shocked - everything is gigantic.  These towers were at least 10 feet tall

 

There were lots of slides for the kids.  So of course we played too

 

They also had ice tunnels so we played in those too

 Bigger slides

 Even bigger colored slides!

Fish slide

 

There was even a big ice maze that we explored

I don't want to make this post too long so I'll just post a few of the competition pieces and the rest of them are in an album

 

This one was my favorite - more pictures here

http://www.icealaska.com/component/zoo/item/mbsite-14-2.html

 More pictures can be found here