Cool stop in Fairbanks!!!
Robocop
works! I am forwarding a copy of this post to her.
Jim
"steinbrenner" <steinb...@freedom.net> wrote in message
news:cG9uZGVydGU=.7f9e0775d7e5313db9e31a38f43dfb80@1035295993.cotse.net...
> Museum has it, flaunts it in land of ice
>
> By Arline Bleecker
>
> Like many cruisers, I'm unfazed by the fanfare that surrounds ice-
> carvings. I've seen enough glace swans adorning cruise ship buffet
> tables to last me a lifetime.
>
> So my expectations remained relatively cool when, on a summertime
> cruise/tour that included Fairbanks, Alaska, a local suggested I check
> out the Ice Museum. I stifled a laugh. What might it display, I
> wondered _ "cube-ist" art?
>
> At first, the attraction sounded like a kitschy nod to O'Neill _ a
> little like "The Icemuseum Cometh." As it turned out, it's worth a peek
> if you're in town.
>
> The small museum occupies a building as unprepossessing as most other
> structures in the frontier town: the vintage Lacey Street Theater, one
> of Fairbanks' first concrete constructions, which, aptly, housed an Ice
> Follies in the 1930s.
>
> The edifice itself is only the tip of the iceberg, though. The museum
> displays one of Fairbanks' more ephemeral attributes: ice.
> Specifically, ice that has been carved into jaw-dropping sculptures _
> many of them larger than life, some soaring to 25-feet high. These are
> carved outdoors in March, when an annual ice-sculpting competition
> lures teams of entrants from around the world during Fairbanks' sub-
> zero winter. The Ice Museum keeps many of the giant ice sculptures
> preserved.
>
> This is one of the few museums in the world in which you can see your
> own breath. Inside, it's colder than a meat locker. In this chilly
> environment, 8,000 cubic feet of glass-fronted walk-in display cases
> maintain a temperature of 20 degrees. The freezers preserve the
> crystalline wonders _ ice tableaux that sculptors had transformed from
> countless tons of "world-famous" Fairbanks ice.
>
> Museum visitors can view the cool creations from the comfort of an
> auditorium. On our visit, we gawked at a Pegasus, sculpted a-la-
> Leonardo da Vinci's "Ornithopter." A vignette of a bear and a felled
> moose was one of the biggest sculptures, carved from 13,000 pounds of
> ice by a chef from Dearborn, Mich. A frozen mythical horse or two
> survived from what once was a life-sized cryogenic carousel.
>
> Arguably, this comprises the world's most temporary exhibition. Or, to
> put it another way, The Iceman Goeth. Nature takes its inevitable toll,
> and the sculptures' details diminish slowly, shriveling drop by
> imperceptible drop. By then, though, the output from the annual
> festival held every March replenishes the museum.
>
> The ice museum was conceived more than a decade ago by Richard
> Brickley, an organizer of Fairbanks' winter ice-sculpting event, who
> operates it with his wife, Hoa, a Vietnamese who happens to be a
> competitive ice-carver.
>
> Brickley says his dream was to give tourists "a snapshot of winter."
> Indeed, the ice museum lets you see in summer what Fairbanks locals
> devote themselves to in the winter, when outside temperatures plummet
> to minus 20 degrees.
>
> Fairbanks lies about 360 miles north of Anchorage, and when winter
> blues set in, temperatures perch somewhere between the ice age and the
> deep freeze. Brickley jokes that it's so cold there in wintertime, "I
> saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets."
>
> According to Brickley, it was Fairbanks' long, frigid, dark winters
> that spawned the sculpt-fest in the first place when, in 1988, the
> townsfolk figured they needed to find something sociable to do.
> Considering that Fairbanks is to ice what Newcastle, England, is to
> coal, they developed a homegrown niche using a resource that had been
> taken for granted for years: the local pond ice, which can freeze to 4
> feet thick.
>
> In "Freeze Frame" _ the museum's aptly titled multimedia slide show,
> which is presented hourly _ you can follow the genesis and
> transformation of ice on O'Grady Pond into giant works of art during
> the World Ice-Art Championships. During the show, we watched the coming
> to life of pagodas, Beauty and the Beast, gold miners and a 12-foot-
> high Cinderella slipper.
>
> Fairbanks ice is considered the best in the world because it is crystal-
> clear with no sediment. Locals proudly have dubbed it the "Arctic
> diamond." The aqua-blue blocks are of such exceptional quality that
> they were even shipped to Albertville, France, for the 1992 Winter
> Olympics.
>
> Townspeople devote months to festival preparation. "As soon as we can
> walk on the pond, we keep it groomed and we pray for cold," Brickley
> says. To promote the growth of ice, volunteer workers regularly clear
> snow off the pond's surface. Absent the snow's insulation, the pond
> freezes faster and deeper.
>
> To prep for the March festival, a small group of intrepid volunteers
> uses circular saws and chain saws with 48-inch blades to harvest
> thousands of tons of ice, which can take more than a month to
> accomplish. Each block _ weighing between 3,000 pounds and 7,500 pounds
> _ is forklifted onto flatbeds and stored under sawdust and tarps to
> await the Michelangelos who coax art from ice.
>
> At last, teams of competitive carvers converge on Fairbanks' "ice
> park," a forested site that protects the ice from sunlight. Some teams
> use as many as 12 chunks of ice to fashion anything from abstract art
> to wild animals in a matter of days. Call it state of the Arctic.
> Previous fests have yielded such ice creations as a dragon, a Buddha
> and a Red Baron plane with a 20-foot wingspan.
>
> Contestants can range from Athabascan Indians and a team from the
> California Coast Guard to restaurant chefs and professional sculptors
> more accustomed to carving in bronze or wood. The ice-artisans' arsenal
> of tools includes chainsaws, drills and something called the Fairbanks
> chisel _ a specially designed 3-inch-wide, 28-inch-long
> implement. "With a sharp enough chisel, it's like carving butter,"
> Brickley says.
>
> Whether you opt to stop by the museum during your Alaska cruise/tour
> next summer or rise to the challenge of a Fairbanks winter this March,
> when about 14,000 ice-oglers attend the sculpting festival, one thing's
> crystal clear: Catch it before it melts.
>
> ___
>
> Write to Arline Bleecker in care of the Orlando Sentinel, 633 N. Orange
> Ave., Orlando, FL 32801. E-mail AJBle...@aol.com.
>
> ___
>
>
> Visit the Sentinel on the World Wide Web at
> http://www.orlandosentinel.com/.
>
>