Snow Sculpture

I first saw the Breckenridge snow sculptures in 1998 and thought: “This doesn’t look too hard. We just need a professional sculptor to guide us.” I cajoled Helaman Ferguson to lead us in our first entry, and the following years had us working with renowned sculptors Robert Longhurst, Bathsheba Grossman, Brent Collins, Carlo Séquin, David Chamberlain, and Eva Hild (Sweden). From 1999 to 2011, Dan Schwalbe and I and two others entered the Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture Contest eleven times. The event is lots of fun and we have won several prizes and honorable mentions. Dan is expert in making tools. I found sculptors to join us and handled much of the logistics and planning. Rich Seeley joined us for the last five events. Notes on six of them:

1. Our first: Invisible Handshake, by and with Helaman Ferguson, in 1999. We barely knew what we were doing and our tools were inadequate, but we did complete it. A granite version by Helaman Ferguson was installed at Macalester College in 2008. See “Invisible Handshake”
at https://www.macalester.edu/mscs/about/physicalmath/ .

2.  Rhapsody in White in 2000 by and with Robert Longhurst (three awards: People’s Choice, Artists’ Choice, Second Place).

3. A Twist in Time in 2002 by and with Bathsheba Grossman (Honorable mention).

4. Whirled White Web in 2003 by and with Brent Collins, Carlos Séquin, and Steve Reinmuth (Second place, and our work was named US Snow Sculpture of the Year). This sculpture crashed about an hour after the judges viewed it!

5. Cool Jazz in 2007 by and with David Chamberlain (second place and featured on the poster for 2008).

6. Perpetual Motion by and with Eva Hild of Sweden in 2011 (our best in my opinion; the main photo on the 2012 poster).

The links below show the eleven sculptures.