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Cold beauty at Lake Geneva's national snow sculpting competition

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Photo by Terry Mayer

Jonathon Baller of Team Minnesota works on “Spanish Dancer 3” during last year’s U.S. National Snow Sculpting Competition. Fifteen teams will start working in the snow on Wednesday, when this year’s competition begins outside the Riviera in Lake Geneva.

LAKE GENEVA — Children love to play in the snow, but carving it, especially when it is a 9-foot cylinder of packed snow, is not child’s play.

Wendy Schultz of Burlington said that hasn’t stopped her children, ages 8 to 14, from trying to create a beautiful sculpture out of what for them, remains winter’s Play-Doh.

(Read all of this week's stories from Walworth County Sunday HERE. )

“We’ve gone to Lake Geneva every year and they sort of gravitated to the children’s area a couple of years ago,” Schultz said. “Ever since, whenever they see snow sculpture in the news or in the papers, they want to go. And we always go to Lake Geneva.”

That’s because starting Wednesday, 15 teams of three sculptors each will converge on Lake Geneva for the U.S. National Snow Sculpting Competition. Starting at 10 a.m. Wednesday, sculptors will take their positions and begin to create magic.

The first thing you have to get used to when sculpting snow in this competition is the crowd -- everything you do is witnessed by the crowd -- some years more than 50,000 people turn out to view the event. And that means they see every triumph, but also every trial and tribulation. If the weather is perfect, let’s say 20 degrees for the four days needed to create the ephemeral works of art, then your challenges are reduced to your own workmanship. But that seldom happens.

In the past, there has been rain, sleet and snow, or snow followed by rain. It’s the warm stuff that is the bane of these artists.

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