While little girls are having teatime with plastic china and an assortment of dolls, little boys are often out in the dirt or in the sandbox playing construction with little Tonka trucks and bulldozers. At least that’s how I remember it... My point is that a fascination with heavy machinery is with guys (and some girls) from an early age. For an ice carver, childhood fantasy becomes adult reality each year in Fairbanks, where lots of heavy machinery is used in the construction of the huge multi-block sculptures at the Ice Art Championships. Talented boom lift operators expertly position delicate sculpture components, making nearly unbelievable works of ice possible. Sometimes, when a final ice piece is lifted into place, the drama gets so thick that you can cut it with a knife. Without the boom lifts and their skilled operators, the Championships would almost certainly not have reached its current position atop the ice carving world.

our eagle, on it’s way to its final resting spot atop our sculpture in 2004

    On a much smaller scale, I currently do some of my sculptures at an ice plant that has a couple of forklifts. During our extended evacuation from New Orleans, I did a lot of sculptures at a cold storage site that also moved product around with forklifts. Fortunately, along the way, I was able to learn how to operate a forklift and I’ve found it to be a very useful skill. I’ll often move ice sculptures in an insulated trailer and aside from saving some wear and tear on my back, the use of a forklift has allowed me to sometimes pack all my sculptures together on a single pallet while in the freezer. Sculptures are of course protected from banging against one another, then the whole pallet is insulated, stretch wrapped, and then loaded into the trailer. As long as most of the sculptures are going to the same place, this has proven to be a much quicker way to load sculptures than loading them one at a time. The ice holds the cold much better when the ice is all wrapped up together too.

    Now obviously, for a forklift to be useful, a lot of other infrastructure has to be in place (i.e., freezer doors have to be large enough). But as ice jobs get larger and larger and when you’re moving around ice for multiple ice bars and the like, the use of forklifts and other heavy equipment often becomes a necessity rather than a luxury. Maybe it sounds like I’m getting lazier as I get older, but I’ll use a forklift as often as possible when I’m at the ice plant. On top of saving myself some heavy lifting though, I’m honing a valuable skill that will pay dividends more and more down the road. Of course, a little part of me sees it as practice for my someday shot at the big leagues: the boom lifts in Fairbanks. I’m having a little trouble figuring out how they’d ever let me drive one of them, but I guess I can dream, can’t I?