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MIDWAY -- Castles of icicles are stretching for the sky in the middle of Midway, and drawing a crowd.
Brent Christensen does not call himself an artist.
"I'm just a guy who happened to stumble on kind of a cool idea," he said.
The incredible creation amazes the sculptor himself as much as anyone else. In fact, he credits nature for the beauty of the Midway Ice Castles.
Price: $5 adults, $3 child & seniors. Sleighs extra.
Location: Town Square Midway (100 N @ 200 W)
Contact info: brent@ice-castles.com
Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of people will stroll through the towering ice structures, gaze into the blue depth of the ice, and wonder out loud about the balance between form and fluidity. He's had visitors from around the world and attracts more than a thousand people on Saturday nights.
"I'm happy when I see how much people enjoy coming to see the ice towers," says Christensen.
The ice sculptor straps on crampons, and carefully climbs up onto the ice ledges. Christensen gently sculpts a structure out of icicles he harvests from the massive structure. But, it's dripping water, gravity, freezing temperatures and the angle of light that truly make the masterpiece.
He works for hours on end, and marvels at the sight in the middle of the night when there's no one else around.
"It's just dead quiet," he says. "I'll be climbing around and I'll see formations that are just out of this world."
He originally got the idea from a friend.
"One year, we saw a friend of ours down in Alpine with a sprinkler running on a big tripod. You get this big pile of ice. So, we did that, and it kind of evolved."
For Christensen's creation there's no substructure; he uses only icicles as building blocks.
He sculpted a castle at a Midway resort last year, but has twice the space now in the town square. As far as he knows, he's the only person in the world creating castles from ice this way.
Christensen turned on the water Christmas Day. With 60 sprinkler heads and a mile of plastic pipe, the ice started to grow, layer by layer as he set the sprinklers higher. On a cold night he adds 20 tons of ice.
"It's cool to see how they morph from one day to the next," he says.
The tallest of the castles are already 25 feet high, and they're still growing. Christensen expects the entire castle structure to double in height by the end of February.
"You really can engineer what you do," he says. "It's just amazing."
Still, the beauty, the colors and the shapes, he says, are out of his hands. In the weeks ahead, Christensen will add a courtyard, archways and bigger towers to the sculpture.
"Just to keep growing it, a little higher to make you just really immersed in it, so, you feel like you're in a completely different world," he explains.
E-mail: jboal@ksl.com
