Plans for an ice palace at the St. Paul Winter Carnival have been dropped, but Minnesotans and Super Bowl visitors will still be able to tour a massive shimmering castle made of ice this winter.
The CEO of Ice Castles LLC said Monday that the company will once again create a frozen attraction in Lowell Park in downtown Stillwater this year.
“It should be a great winter,” said Ice Castles’ CEO Ryan Davis. “Every year we learn something new, and we get a little bit better, and we think that we’ve got a really good plan for this winter with the Super Bowl and everything.”
More than 70,000 visitors toured the castle in Stillwater last year — even though the season was cut short due to unseasonably warm temperatures and rain.
This year’s structure, which will be open from late December to February 2018, weather permitting, will feature slides, fountains, maze-like tunnels and a new design.
Crews plan to build on the shores of the St. Croix River, but expand to the north and south this winter. Davis said he hopes to continue building in Stillwater in the years to come; the Utah-based company previously built in Eden Prairie and at the Mall of America in Bloomington.
“Downtown Stillwater is just a beautiful setting,” Davis said. “They’ve got great restaurants, they’ve got great nightlife. It’s got a small-town feel, and it’s just beautiful. It’s a great place to be. We try to find a place that has a really good family nightlife — more a place to take the kids out to eat — and then just a place that people want to go.”
Stillwater is one of six cities in North America that will host an ice castle this winter. Locations include: Midway, Utah; Lincoln, N.H.; Dillon, Colo.; Edmonton, Alberta; and Winnipeg, Manitoba
Downtown Stillwater was much busier last winter because of the castle tourists, said Mayor Ted Kozlowski.
“I’m very happy to have it back,” he said. “There were just tons of kids and families enjoying it. It was nice to see all the smiling faces in downtown in the wintertime.”
Crews have already started prepping for construction, Davis said. The castle requires about two to three months of prep work. Crews will start laying everything out and hope to turn the water on around Dec. 1.
“There’s a lot that goes into it,” he said.
Instead of using blocks of ice to build a traditional ice palace, crews spend several weeks growing and harvesting tens of thousands of icicles to make a towering, glacier-like structure that is then sprayed with water — like something out of “Frozen.” Thousands of color-changing LED lights are embedded in the 25 million pounds of ice.
Ice Castle LLC will hire about 100 employees to build and work at the attraction. Applications for the build crew are now being accepted at IceCastles.com; candidates must be 18 or older, be able to work in extreme cold and lift up to 50 pounds.
Super Bowl LII will be played Feb. 4 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Last week, Winter Carnival organizers abandoned a planned ice palace on the grounds of the state Capitol. They cited a lack of interest from would-be funders.
Copyright 2017 Pioneer Press.