Temps hit 40 degrees on the opening day of the St. Paul Winter Carnival today, creating pleasant conditions for Harriet Island visitors but wreaking havoc with the popular ice sculptures.
Visitors gave good reviews to the carnival’ newly consolidated home – once they stopped griping about the scarcity and expense of parking in and around downtown.
“It’s great that it’s all in one location,” said Mary Rose Turner, of Mendota Heights, as tried to corral some of the five children who were with her and friend Jill Droubie. “Parking’s kind of hard, though. There’s no place to really park around here.”
Ice sculptures and other attractions suffered under the warm sun. One sculpture of the St. Paul skyline was crumbling. A snow slide was gray and slushy.
Although the Winter Carnival is providing free shuttle rides from downtown to Harriet Island, waits for the shuttles seemed lengthy earlier today. They were supposed to run every 15 to 20 minutes, but waits often went longer.
“The hardest thing is getting there,” said Harriet Youngmark of Rosemount as she stood at one of the shuttle stops near the Empire Building downtown.
“I just figured ‘park wherever you can and take the bus’,” she said as she waited and waited at the stop. “That might not have been a good idea.”
On the island – which hasn’t been an island since the 1950s, when a channel between it and the shore was filled in – carnival-goers got to gawk at the ice sculptures and watch the competitors in the snow sculpture contest saw, chisel and chip their entries.
“What are you making?” Pat Mooney, of St. Paul, asked one sculptor as he sat atop his 12-foot-tall block of snow.
“A diving board,” the man replied.
“Are you going to jump?” asked Mooney’s 6-year-old grandson, Andrew Mooney.
The weekend forecast calls for cooler temperatures.
Copyright 2007 Pioneer Press.
