This weekend is jam-packed with events in Breckenridge. The two big events are the Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture Competition and the Fire Arts Festival. One thing to note is that with these two events going on blocks away from each other, the town is packed and there is no town parking. You’ll want to walk or take a shuttle to the events.
Thursday night we walked down to see the first night of the Fire Arts Festival and the ice sculptures, which were about 1/2 way through the carving phase. Both events are really cool and unique! I will be giving each festival its own post but I couldn’t resist putting them together to make Fire & Ice.
We started off walking through the ice sculpture exhibits. As I said, they were about half-way through the carving phase so most of the sculptures had the backbone of what the final product would be and they were moving on to the finer touches of the sculptures. It’s really amazing what they can do with a 12 foot square block of frozen snow. The participants have 65 hours, which started on Tuesday, to carve anything they want by hand. There are no power-tools allowed in the carving. There are teams from all over the world. Here are a few examples of the carvings in progress:
The Fire Arts Festival is a one of a kind arts event that uses fire in large artistic installations. From Main Street, the entrance has a wheel of spinning fire that rotates by a hand crank. Viewers are encouraged to crank the wheel to get the sculpture to spin. Curt walked up to spin it and once it started spinning, the back piece fell off! As the former Governor of Texas would say, Oops! You can see a video of it here on my YouTube Channel.
I am happy to report that the fire wheel was fixed quickly and spinning again for everyone to enjoy.
