Feb 13, 2007

Winterlude 2007 ice & snow winners

The Winterlude ice carving and snow sculpting winners have been announced in Ottawa, Canada! Ice carving (solo category) was won by Ross Baisas of Canada with “Arctic Hunting”. Hitoshi Shimmoto of France came in second with “Water Goddess” and Mark Davis of the US came in third with “Pressure Sensitive”.

Ice carving (pairs category) was won by Junichi Nakamura and Ka Wai Wong (Japan/Canada) with “Queen of the Coral”, followed by Samuel Girault and Robert Burkat (France/Poland) in second place with “Hope” and Hideshi Terada and Takashi Ito, (Canada) with “Friends”.

Snow sculptors from the Northwest Territories won the top prize (no surprise there!), followed by a second-place finish from the team from Nova Scotia and British Columbia in third place.

Check out the above links for photo tips chronicling each stage of design, marking, carving and display of the work.

By the way, it's freezing as I write this, with a storm projected to dump 10 to 15 cm of snow onto Toronto. The city slowed to a crawl during the evening rush today, and I expect the morning commute to be a tedious affair unless the road crews manage a miracle overnight.

Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to the weekend's toboganning and snowman building with some of the kiddies in my life. The most popular pro tools appear to be scrapers, chisels and chainsaws; I'm going to be using a shovel, a scraper and my mitted hands...