Ice Festival

This summer, Joel and I discovered several local and semi-local events to take the kids to. The great thing about these events is that they are all within driving distance and they are FREE!! One of the best places to find these little events is Cripple Creek ... a town just about an hour away in the mountains. You'll remember that we attended the Donkey Derby there this last summer and took a train ride through the historic mines too. It seems that summertime is not the only time that Cripple Creek hosts these various festivals! This last weekend Cripple Creek was home to the Ice Festival!!! They have several artists and sculptors come out and carve things into ice. We had an unseasonably warm weekend here and it was a perfect opportunity to take the drive and see some ice sculptures! The theme this year was something to do with storybooks so all of the designs were of things that we recognized!

Fire-breathing dragon.

The Lost Boys

Neverland

Peter Pan, Wendy, and Captain Hook

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

My personal favorite ... Star Wars. This one was pretty awesome!

In the process... see the flying snow?

The Cheshire Cat

Are you wondering why there are no pictures of us at this fine event? Well, as I said before it was unseasonable warm this past weekend and the ice sculptures were actually melting faster than they could be finished. Occasionally a chunk would fall off of one of these sculptures and we were afraid that one of the kids would get clobbered by one so we made them stay away! So, you'll just have to enjoy the lovely sculptures and look forward to more family pictures in our next post :)