That’s a wrap!
We thank our generous and hearty Volunteers who stayed on to clean up, inventory and store equipment; Sculptor Support staff who finished filing and have mailed out certificates to the competing Artists; the remaining Ice Artists and Laborers who took advantage of the opportunity to harvest and bank ice blocks for next season!
Mr. Steve Brice provided this report from the Pond: With our final harvest we had to come up with a new system to get ice safely stored away. We had to start and stop harvest to store ice. At 30”, the ice was thicker than we planned. This means more cubic feet of ice will be stored. Phil has developed a system to gently slide the ice onto a pallet without it sliding off. It is important to get the ice blocks inside the insulated containers while they are still pristine. The edges of the blocks are just beginning to show sun damage but 99% of the blocks are perfect. At this moment we have 45 blocks safely floating in the pond ready to be pulled out and put in the last two containers tomorrow, we have four containers full and locked up for the season. This is a new way of storage for ice, it eliminates dirty sawdust and will leave us 16 perfect blocks per container.
Other behind the scenes work includes reporting from all the Department Team Leaders as we highlight what worked this year, and what we should change for next year. Preliminary count looks like we had a little over 300 volunteers this year, and we could not have produced the World Ice Art Championships without each and every one of you!
