Have chisel, will travel
A national championship team of Minnesotans will fly to Colorado today to take part in a big, invitation-only international competition. Here’s what they’ll be checking in their bags:
Razor-sharp chisels, logging saws, shovels, auto-body tools, industrial-size cleaning brushes, linoleum scrapers, apple corers, animal-grooming combs, herb mincers and rasps.
Travel security officials who inspect their luggage will probably wonder: “Who are these guys?” But that’s because they probably aren’t familiar with the world of elite-level competitive snow carving.
Minnesota Big Snow is the current reigning national champion in snow sculpting, which involves creating a work of art — using only hand tools — out of a 22-ton block of snow bigger than a typical garden shed.
This week, the Minnesotans are heading to Breckenridge, Colo., to compete in the Budweiser International Snow Sculpture Championships against 15 teams from places like Bulgaria, China, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.
Next month, they’re headed to Lake Geneva, Wis., to defend their title at the United States Nationals Snow Sculpting Competition.
They’ve come a long way from their start playing in the sand.
About 20 years ago, Kelley Casey, a 44-year-old architectural designer from Roseville, and Gerry Proulx, a 47-year-old construction code official from Robbinsdale, started entering the sand castle competition held during the Minneapolis Aquatennial.
It was a successful partnership, with Casey and Proulx leading a team that won two first-place and two best-of-show sand-sculpting awards in the early 1990s.
“We had kind of done everything we could do in sand,” Proulx said. “We needed a bigger challenge.”
Then they heard of the snow-sculpting competition held by the St. Paul Winter Carnival.
Casey and Proulx entered in 1996 and found that scraping a frozen block of snow in the middle of winter is harder than patting sand on a sunny beach.
“The sand competition is three or four hours, and this is 2 1/2 days,” Casey said.
Unlike ice carvers, who commonly use torches and chain saws in their work, competitive snow carvers are prohibited from using any heat source or power tools. They have to do all their carving by hand.
“It’s really exhausting,” Proulx said.
“It’s like moving the snow- bank at the end of your driveway to your back yard and back again,” Casey said.
The novice snow carvers also didn’t have a very original artistic vision in their first competition.
Just like novice chain-saw wood carvers all want to carve a bear and ice carvers seek to create a swan, “We learned after the second day that everyone does the polar bear the first year,” Casey said.
But they got better.
In 2007, the team captained by Casey won the Winter Carnival competition, which is the state championship. They also began competing and doing snow-carving exhibitions in Canada. Last year, they took the national title with “Shark’s Lair,” their depiction of an underwater scene made of snow.
Besides Casey and Proulx, the team currently includes Paul Diekoff Jr., 43, a store planner for Target and Shoreview resident; Pat Mogren, 47, a Maplewood artist and stay-at-home dad; and David White, 41, a buyer for Allina Health Systems, from Elk River.
Among them, the teammates share expertise in custom car building, painting, carpentry and cake decorating and a degree in fine arts, which apparently have translated well into snow carving.
Proulx estimates that there are about a thousand people worldwide who are serious snow carvers. Casey said many of their competitors are professional stone carvers or artists.
“The Danes were tree surgeons who carved on the side,” Proulx said.
Competitors tend to be middle-age men, but “there’s a lot of tough gals out there,” Casey said.
Because competitions can last two to four days, with near round-the-clock work in the final hours, “part of the competition is stamina,” Proulx said.
“It’s a sport to some degree,” Diekoff said.
Working with a block of packed snow can be a lot like carving stone.
“It can be hard as marble,” Proulx said.
But the quality of the raw material varies depending on the weather conditions at each site, whether the snow is natural or manmade, how well the snow block is packed, whether the team is assigned a block in the shade or the sun or whether the snow is hauled from a field or scraped up from a parking lot.
“At the Winter Carnival, we were pulling cigarettes out of the block, and pop cans,” White said.
The team members don’t practice for events. Unless you have access to a really big pile of snow, heavy equipment and a team of volunteers, it’s too hard to create a packed snow block bigger than an SUV in your own back yard.
“It isn’t something you do in a weekend,” Casey said.
In competitions, team members have learned the tricks of the craft, like how to repair or rebuild part of a sculpture that has collapsed, and not adding water to a carving because it will refreeze into unsightly dark streaks. The team also creates a scale model in clay of what it intends to carve during each event.
In Colorado, it will be a rodeo scene: a rider getting thrown from a larger-than-life, bucking, anatomically correct bull while a cowboy clown pops out of a barrel to lend assistance, all carved out of snow. No internal support structures are allowed in the final work.
“They’re crazy for rodeo in Colorado,” Proulx said.
A lot of snow carvers do abstract works, but the Minnesotans prefer realistic sculptures. That’s part of the reason they need so many weird tools. An apple corer might be used to poke holes in part of a sculpture representing a coral reef. An herb mincer could create the grooves depicting the hair on a buffalo.
“We specialize in texture,” White said.
At the big out-of-town competitions, team members usually are provided with food and lodging by event organizers. Winners get trophies and medals, but there’s typically no prize money.
They’ve gotten invitations to compete at the Harbin International Snow Sculpture Competition in Harbin, China. “It’s like the Super Bowl,” Proulx said. But they can’t afford the travel.
Basically, they’re competing for admiration and glory, although there’s sometimes not much of that.
At the national competition in Lake Geneva, the sculpting competition will attract 60,000 to 100,000 competitors.
But at the Winter Carnival competition, the snow sculpture event has been bounced around to different locations like Como Park, Harriet Island and the State Fairgrounds. So they’re often overshadowed by the more glamorous ice-carving competition, which is always held in Rice Park and seems to get featured on television news, according to the snow sculptors.
“It typically gets the spotlight,” Casey said.
“It’s often a sore spot with us,” Proulx said.
And of course, snow sculpture glory is fleeting at best.
Following the competition, the works will either collapse, melt or get bulldozed.
But after days of sawing, chipping, chiseling, scraping and brushing, team members are fine with walking away from all that white stuff.
“You’re emotionally drained,” Proulx said. “I don’t want to see it fall, but you’re done.”
Richard Chin can be reached at 651-228-5560.
Copyright 2009 Pioneer Press.
