Winter Carnival Sculptures

So one of the biggest highlights and traditions of the McCall Winter Carnival is the amazing snow/ice sculptures that they do. This year's theme was "Wild, Wild West", which is pretty obvious from all of the sculptures. The Carnival essentially runs from the last weekend in January through the first weekend in February. On Friday the 25th, we went around and saw some of the sculptures. We didn't make it to all of them (there are over 40 at least), but we saw some pretty cool ones. They are spread throughout the town as they are sponsored by different stores, restaurants, hotels, etc.and are built in their parking lots, which makes it kind of hard with kids being in and out of car seats, but it is worth the trip. . Below are a couple of the cool ones that we saw and I'm sure we missed many other great ones. This is like the first day that some of them were finished and some were probably completed after we left. If we go next year we'll plan it better, but this year we ran into Nathan's nap and he was getting tired and cranky and we needed him to nap so he could be happy and have energy for his party later in the day. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Some of them we just drove by and looked at from the car but below are the ones that we got out of the car and took pictures of. I hope you can realize how huge these are. Unfortunately with the sun out and all the whiteness of the snow the clarity of the pics is not as good as they are in real-life. Sorry.





The five pics above are all from the same display, which was definitely one of the coolest. It was huge and had like 5-6 huge cattle, two cowboys on horseback, a cave with two Native Americans carved into the side of the cave (see difficult-to-see pic above of me and Nathan in front of one of the Native Americans). This one was huge and really neat!

This was the front of a train in front of "My Father's Place" the diner we went to for lunch for Nathan's birthday. The kids enjoyed seeing this one and we all enjoyed the chimes of "Choo Choo" from Sarah and Nathan.

A prospector mining for gold in front of the old Burger Den that apparently is no longer.

The three pics above are obviously from the same one of a bunch of wild stallions going through a river or some kind of body of water. There are 7 horses that are ornately carved with really detailed manes and tails. It's really cool how they make the water look so real.

Well that's the last of the snow sculpture pics. We'd love to have some people come and join us for next year's carnival. It's worth the drive and there is lot's to do, besides just enjoying being together and playing in the snow. We were fortunate to be there on Friday as it got really busy on Saturday and Sunday and we were able to avoid the crowds. However, we wished we would have planned things better and gone to participate in some of their other events or seen more of the sculptures. By the time we were leaving on Monday some of the sculptures had already melted or been covered somewhat in the snow. The people try to gently sweep the snow off, but it is hard to re-do anything that is melted by sun or fluctuating temps.