Despite warm weather, Winter Carnival’s ice and snow carving competitions are still happening

Despite unseasonably high temperatures, the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s ice carving and snow sculpting programs began as scheduled Thursday and Friday.

Ice carvers started their creations in the team multi-block carving competition at 7 p.m. Thursday night, and the 48-hour competition is scheduled to proceed as normal through Saturday evening, a carnival representative confirmed.

And as of 11:30 a.m. Friday, snow sculptors had begun crafting their own larger-than-life creations at the Vulcan Snow Park at the Minnesota State Fair, the Vulcans announced on Facebook.

All events are weather-permitting, so various ice- and snow-based events are subject to be canceled at any time during the carnival if safety concerns arise. Temperatures are expected to remain above freezing, with many days in the mid-40s, through the end of this year’s carnival.

Warm weather has already resulted in the cancellations of several annual wintertime events. Organizers of the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships announced Thursday that they were canceling the event’s final “golden weekend,” scheduled for Jan. 26-28, because of poor ice conditions on Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis. The planned ice maze at the Minnesota Ice Festival is also a no-go, as are several other community programs.

When Terry Reis returned to Rice Park on Friday morning, he found that about an inch of ice had melted off the sculpture his team had begun carving the night before, he said midday Friday.

Most teams this year plan to do much of the carving after dark and to cover their artworks-in-progress with thermal tarps during the daytime hours to keep them as intact as possible, he said.

The multi-block competition concludes at 7 p.m. Saturday. The other two ice carving competitions — individual carver single-block, artisan and professional divisions — are scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Sunday and run for six hours.

All the completed ice sculptures are slated to remain on display in Rice Park through the end of the carnival, as long as they don’t melt first. That fate is becoming increasingly likely, said Reis, who has been carving for four decades.

“Having done this all these years, I don’t think these things will make it till Wednesday, with the weather for this week being what they’re predicting,” Reis said.

Reis’s team always prepares several designs so they can adjust for weather, he said. If temperatures are low, they’ll carve a more ambitious piece, like the robot landscape that won them first place last year, but they always have a warm-weather backup planned.

This year, the team quickly realized they’d need to pivot to their warm-weather design — a mermaid riding a shark — which has a more solid foundation and does not rely on gravity to remain intact.

Reis and his team plan to return to Rice Park after sunset Friday night to continue carving.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said. “Part of the game, man.”

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