Ice Around Town

Last Saturday, Jim and I took a day to go see the Ice Around Town ice sculptures being put up in conjunction with the Peninsula Winter Games and the Native Youth Olympics. The PWG is a children's carnival-type event where the kids can play ice bowling, go on snow machine rides, kicksled, and have all sorts of fun. If you have children and plan to be in the area at the end of January, this is definitely the place to bring them!

We were more interested in the snow sculptures than anything, though, and made it a quest to see them all without benefit of the not-yet-posted-to-their-website list of locations. Turns out we saw all but one - the one at the Kenai airport - even though we've driven past it twice since then and still haven't seen it! Oh well, on to the ones we *did* get to see... And you're gonna wanna enlarge these to see them better.

This one is in front of the Arby's in Kenai and is their oven mitt mascot:

Here's the Dairy Queen's ice cream cone man: 

In front of the radio station is this cute retro transistor radio:

The Duck Inn's karaoke duck:

The Binkley Street dentists' office chose Scrat from Ice Age holding a tooth:

The Soldotna Professional Pharmacy has a leaping salmon:

The Peninsula Food Bank has tomatoes, onion and corn (not breaching whales):

Sweeney's and Mikel's combined to put on this sculpture of a mountain man sledding downhill behind a penguin:

Trustworthy Hardware has a fisherman with a nice big salmon:

The Soldotna Chamber of Commerce has an interactive sculpture that Jim posed with:

The Kenai Peninsula Borough has their logo:

And once you get to the Sports Center where the games were held, there were even more!  This is the logo for this year's games - an ice skating polar bear:

Peak Oilfield Service has their logo outside the sports center:

A sled dog for the Tustumena 200:

The ice slide for the children to play on couldn't be done justice with just one picture, so we took several. Here's the bears that marked the steps to climb up:

And the salmon at the bottom of the slide:

More of the slide:

And I swiped this pic from the Peninsula Clarion because it was so much better than ours.  ;^)

Local celebrity chainsaw carver Scott Hansen works on a bear and eagle sculpture outside the sports arena. Those of you who've visited us have probably driven past his Living Trees chainsaw carving shop and tourist attraction between Sterling and Soldotna.

And this is so you can see how big these sculptures were:

It was a lovely sunny day to drive around and see these works of art, and we had a lot of fun. Fortunately, we're in for more cold, clear weather and can expect the sculptures to be around for a while.