As the temperatures stay well below freezing, and the penetrating winds create a wind chill that will freeze your nose hair within minutes, our family accepts the challenge to join a few dozen community members to build an epic ice igloo in the center of town for the upcoming Winter Carnival. The huge project was spearheaded by our friend Crystal who saw the idea from another town in Nova Scotia and knew that our little town of Parrsboro would appreciate this addition to our town square. Her perseverance and dedication to the project amazed us and we wanted to help alleviate some of the burden as it was a huge undertaking. To start with, about 700 two litre juice and milk jugs were collected from all around the community, including the 400 we acquired from the recycling depot an hour away and stuffed into Reddy (our little red travel van). Next step was to fill all those jugs with water and food coloring. To accomplish this task, the scouts, guides, and school kids were enlisted throughout the week to help out. The week leading up to the carnival had fluctuating temperatures so it would have been hard for the water to freeze solid outside. Luckily, Crystal's family owns a huge walk-in freezer that they use during the fishing season that had room for all the jugs. In the mean time, Crystal's husband kindly built a wooden frame to be used when constructing the igloo with the ice blocks. On February 11th, construction began. When we arrived downtown the task of opening all of the ice blocks had started. It was a frigged morning, so even with gloves on, opening the boxes was quite difficult. Soon the frame arrived and construction commenced. Because the days leading up to the construction brought freezing rain there wasn't much snow to work with, so we made a few runs to the arena to get buckets of snow that had come off the ice by the Zamboni. After experimenting with the best way to create the snow mortar (water, slush, snow) a method was found. The construction of the dome ended up taking 11.5 hours, two days, about a dozen people, 450 ice blocks and many frozen bodies. :) This was on top of the over 13 hours of prep time. Two flood lights were placed in the center and the dome was sealed (because it is unmanned it was thought to be safer to seal it so that kids don't play inside and possibly get hurt). The evening of the second day of work we all met back up for the official lighting. It was beautiful. AND - It was done and lit! Final work on the door was done as part of the Carnival itself - members of the town brought down the blocks they have frozen at home and helped finish the construction of the igloo.
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April 2019
AuthorCarolyn and Will Bollwerk share their adventures with their 5 year-old daughter, Dylan. |