Roaring Good Time at City of Lakes Loppet Snow Sculpture Contest

From 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. Saturday February 4, fifteen blocks of packed snow were transformed in some imaginative ways in surprise, delight and whimsy. It happened at the City of Lakes Loppet Snow Carving Contest. The event had originally been scheduled to be near the Beach House on the North of Lake Calhoun at Uptown. That was while the Loppet racing had hoped to finish at Hennepin with the final leg of the race running down a stretch of Lake Street.

A lack of Snow and adequate freezing of the lakes along the proposed courses, caused all the events to be rescheduled and held in With Park this year. There were 15 blocks with a sixteenth still boarded but in a partly frozen / thawed puddle. One was sculpted by some of the Hopkins Nordic Ski club members when it turned out no other participants laid claim. In talking with the group that turned up from Washburn, they and only found out and became involved the night before. Some of the best sculptures show planning done long ahead of time; even some custom tool making.

The results;

1st Place: Minnesota Big Snow – Desert Flower – Pat Mogren & Gerry Proulx

2nd place: Manville North – Wizard of Oz – Adam Turner, David Ryding & Charlie Swanson (1st year snow sculpting, ever).

3rd Place : Minnesota Big Snow – Rat Fink – David White & Paul Diekoff
Great effort by all the teams and another great success

Here are a few images of each of  blocks;

These and additional images can be accessed at my flickr account; Snow Sculpture Contest, 2012 City of Lakes Loppet

Some of the same participaints were also at the 2011 Contest. I have a groups of images at this WordPress blog.

Alan Wilfahrt