It’s the Ice Castles’s second year in Cripple Creek. They have been operating around the state since 2011. Thursday 12/19/24 is their opening day.
I talked with Clay Davis, the build manager here at the ice castles. He’s been working for the ice castles for five years. I asked about how things have changed from his perspective over the years.
“Winters are becoming slightly warmer and shorter, so figuring out how to do this faster and more efficiently so that we can be open and provide the experience for the winners is very important so yeah, trying to learn new techniques of how to build these things.”
Davis tells me more about how the displays are created.
“We grow and harvest thousands of icicles somewhere in the range of 5 to 10,000 a day we have two different types of building icicles that we do. We have farm racks where we grow icicles and we have an icicle factory and those two ways are how we produce all of our icicles, and then we just kind of placed them on a way away around the castle that it starts getting height and filling in and growing.”