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MIDWAY — Utah's 15 ski and snowboarding resorts aren't the only ones benefitting from a cold and snowy end to 2022.
The organizers behind Midway's Ice Castles say they are ready to open on Wednesday, the earliest it has ever opened since the annual winter attraction first debuted a little over a decade ago. Ice Castles CEO Kyle Standifird adds it's also the first time they've been able to open before Christmas — though the castles will still be closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
"Mother Nature has been good to us this season, and we're excited to welcome guests to Ice Castles over the holiday break," he said in a statement Friday.
Ice Castles, which first opened in 2011, will be held at the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center again this winter. Ice artisans have been "working around the clock" over the past few weeks to construct the attraction's popular ice-carved tunnels, slides, thrones and towers, which are lit up by color-changing LED lights, event officials said.
The process often includes growing up to 10,000 icicles every day, company officials explained last month, when the process began. These icicles are then blended together with water to form structures up to about 20 feet in height.
Tickets to Ice Castles are $12 for children between the ages of 4 and 11, and $18 for people 12 and up. They are available through the company's website.
The company's announcement comes after another wintry storm pelted Utah with more snow. The state's overall snowpack remained at 148% of normal for this point in the season on Friday, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service data.
After a hot end of summer and beginning of fall, Utah has also experienced below-normal temperatures in the past month-and-a-half. Last month was Utah's 14th-coldest November since statewide records were first kept in 1895, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.
National Weather Service data shows that Deer Creek Reservoir, the closest station it has to Nordic Valley, had an average temperature of almost 30 degrees in November, 5.7 degrees below its normal for the month. That trend has mostly continued in December — the average temperature this month is currently 1.7 degrees below normal, according to the data.
