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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
De Beers Canada's Inspired Ice: NWT Ice Carving Championship attracted seven teams at last month's Long John Jamboree, including one from the United States, but organizers are hoping to expand the event next year.

Bill Nasogaluak, who collaborated with Tawna Brown, works on his piece, titled Our Sovereign Nation, at the Long John Jamboree on March 24. - Simon Whitehouse/NNSL photo

Ken Diederich, executive director of the National Ice Carving Association, came to Yellowknife thanks to Keith MacNeil's cold calls for the jamboree, and photos on the jamboree's Facebook page showing the large ice blocks being extracted from the lake. Those blocks are now being labelled Crystal Blue Aurora Ice.

The association is the largest organization of ice sculptors in the world, with more than 600 sanctioned events. The group promotes ice for artistic features at trade shows and exhibitions all across the world.

Diederich served as one of the judges and spoke highly about Yellowknife and its potential for future ice-carving competitions.

"We're kind of looking from this year's event to next year's event," he said.

"Some of the world's most foremost carvers are now vying for the opportunity to come here because there are only a few places with full blocks of ice that are anywhere near that size."

The roughly six by four by three foot blocks used this year were chainsawed out of Great Slave Lake on March 17 and fork-lifted onto large hauler trucks. Diederich hopes that Yellowknife can set a world-class standard by cutting bigger blocks next year.

"We are probably going to pull eight feet and five inches next year and that is what we are going to attempt," he said." We would like to set the standard for pulling the biggest blocks on the circuit."

He said Yellowknife could become one of a very few cities that hosts sculpting competitions with such sizable pieces of ice. Russia and Finland have been known to deliver large blocks of ice in recent years, he said, but those have tended to be blocks in and around four feet tall.

MacNeil, who was the ice sculpting co-ordinator for the jamboree, said he thought the size of the blocks this year was the standard size.

"If we wanted to go bigger, could we lift them out of the ice?" he said, adding the blocks this year weighed between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds. "I don't know, but that is something that we are going to explore over the next year."

Diederich said on average, shows sanctioned by the National Ice Carving Association use 300-pound single-ice-block pieces manufactured by Clinebell. Each block is 20 inches wide, 40 inches tall and 10 inches thick. Manufactured in steel tubs, the ice is laid and spun with pumps so impurities freeze at the top and are cut off to make the ice crystal clear.

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