There’s at least one group of people loving the recent arctic chill – Team Wisconsin at the annual International Snow Sculpture Championships in Breckenridge.
Krystal 93 news director Phil Lindeman caught up with the team (Jeff Shawhan, Brett Tomczak, Gregory Brula, Gran Volz) for a Q&A about this year’s contest.
Krystal 93: What did you carve for us this year?
Jeff Shawhan: We created a piece based on Icarus, the fable from mythology. He ascends to a height that he couldn’t reach because he built his wings out of wax. His dad told him not to fly too close to the sun, but he didn’t heed the warning and crashed into the ocean and perished.
K93: But this sculpture is not crashing down. Talk about the conditions this year. It has been subzero most of the week and you have been out in it.
Brett Tomczak: This is our collective tenth or eleventh year here and by far the best conditions we’ve ever had for sculpting. This is not a good spectator sport, especially with weather that we had this week. However, days like today, when the sculpting is done and the sun is out, with bluebird skies early in the day like, you can’t ask for better conditions. But this cold weather, and mostly cloudy, that’s why all of these pieces look as good as they do. The weather was on our side.
K93: There’s a panel of judges voting on the best of show. But teams get to vote for the Artists’ Choice Award. Who are you picking?
Gregory Brula: I was the last person to turn in my ballot for Artists’ Choice. There are six pieces here that I’m like, ‘Oh, this one, that one, this one, that one.’ And it’s so hard to get to vote on one person.
K93: But if you had to pick one…
Gregory: India.
Gran Volz: Germany.
Brett: I went with Mexico.
Jeff: I picked Germany too.
K93: And now you guys are off to take a nap. You’ve been at it for five days straight.
Gran Volz: It can be quite an endurance type of thing because we pulled an all-nighter last night. But I knew that after the second day we were pushing for time. When you have four guys all doing different things, interfering with each other stuff, I needed to really concentrate on that. So I pulled two all-nighters. There’s emotional portions of it and there’s technical portions, and then your physical ability to maintain.