Where the romance of train hopping, the coziness of a Yellowknife shack and the crackle of an old country record on the stereo meet you have the makings of a Ryan McCord show — many thanks to Janna Graham for that eloquent bio intro. This website is mostly focused on my music. I do like to post about other stuff that I’ve been working on too, though. You can take a look at the ‘categories’ tab over on the lower right, and see if there’s anything that interests you. Or try out the search function if there’s something specific that you’re looking for. If you want to get in touch, feel free to reach out via the info on the contact page.
I’ve been the main builder of the ice slides at Snowkings’ Winter Festival for a number of years now. They are one of the most popular parts of the snowy castle, and they get ridden thousands and thousands of times over the course of the month-long festival. I had great hopes of documenting the entire construction of the slide structure this year with photos, but as it turns out, I don’t have as many good ones as I would like. The photo above shows the slides on the opening day of the castle. They have not been ridden very much yet, and the third slide (on the right) is not yet completed. You can see what I built though – two straight slides, one a bit steeper than the other, and a twisty slide through the tunnel under the stairs bridge. This video shows it better than that photo:
I’ve settled in to a bit of a formula for building the “slide platform,” i.e. the top of the slides, where people line up to get onto them. It starts by plotting out a base 16′ X16′ on the ice, and locating it wherever it needs to be in relation to the rest of the castle. Here it is, laid out with 2X4s, with none of the rest of the castle visible yet (it’s under construction to the left out of the picture). You can see Snowking driving the Bobcat, harvesting snow for building somewhere else on the castle.
In past years, I’ve always had the slides run perpendicular to the sides of the platform, but this year they were to go at a forty-five degree angle to it. So in this picture, the angled board across the square is showing the future trajectory of the slides. They were aimed straight towards the orange houseboat in the distance (the “Empress of Yellowknife”). The reason they go in that direction is to ensure that the slides are facing away from the warmer afternoon sun as much as possible. One warm sunny day can wreak havoc on the ice if they are facing the sun, and this helps to reduce that risk. I would aim them even more towards the north, but the direction is a compromise between avoiding the sun and having to fit in place with the rest of the castle. (In the end I had to compromise further and aim the slides slightly to the right of their original target).
How it all starts: The first two ice blocks laid in place on the ice. These will form a window wall which is sort of the backbone of the whole slide platform. The slide platform will be poured in with snow to a height of almost thirteen feet, with a hollow cavity below. That cavity will be part of of the tunnels under the slides – it was a space that I was calling the solarium this year. The afternoon sunlight streamed in there and made a really beautiful space. This ice wall also acts as a supporting buttress for the snow load above, which helps to reduce slumping. It will also be a feature along the exterior walls of the castle.
January 28, 2026. Making good progress on the ice wall on a dramatic cloud day, looking south out Yellowknife Bay towards Dettah.
The ice wall is finished, and the formwork is near at hand on the right to start setting up to pour the snow. The wall is free-standing, and measured 12’9″ high, which ended up being the exact height of the top platform for accessing the slides. I did most of the construction on my own. I use smaller ice blocks the higher the wall gets to keep it manageable.
Almost ready to pour. We call these large arched forms “Titan Beetles”, Beetle being the name we use for all of these hinged, arched forms (there are several different sizes, Titan being the largest). The footprint of the solarium will be 10X12 feet; there is also a smaller beetle on the other side of the ice wall which reduces the amount of snow that has to be removed to reveal the outside of the window. The slide platform will be just above the top of the beetle arch, level with the top of the ice. The entire platform will then get railings of snow up to sixteen feet, which is the height of the form walls pictured here. The wall on the left is the “pour wall”, which is the side from which the snow will be blasted in by the Bobcat. The opposite, or back, wall is what we call the “splash wall.” Philippe (“Ever Ready Eddy Frost”) is inspecting the progress, by the looks of it.
Castle site on Feb 1, 2026. Formwork is all closed in on the slide platform. Wall extenders are on the splash wall to bring its height to 20′, to catch as much snow as possible. Eventually the slide platform will be connected to the main part of the castle, and the courtyard will extend further out to the right.
After the snow is poured and all the formwork is removed. I’m working on opening up the exterior of the window to a round arch shape. I always forget how much work it is to remove even this much snow! Most of the window was already clear due to the beetle form that had been in there, but even carving up to the arched line on the wall is several hours’ work. This was intended to be a big feature wall, and I even earmarked it for myself to carve later in the season. Unfortunately, I never had the chance, or took the opportunity, to finish it. It remained a half-round arch on a smooth wall for the entire castle season, and even beyond, surviving teardown and ultimately waiting for spring melt. (As of April 15, this ice wall is still standing).
Speaking of never having a chance… From this point onwards, I must have gotten too caught up in the whirlwind of just getting the slides built, and I basically stopped taking photos. I wish that I had done better at documenting the processes of laying out the slide bases (with tunnels underneath), selecting and prepping ice panels for the actual slides, harvesting and prepping ice for the side bumpers, and actually placing the ice in the slides. This year I did two types of slide construction – the flat, straight ones with side bumpers, and also the “barrel vaulted” twisty slide, which was a return to a style of construction that I first tried in 2021, using “bricks” of ice to create a sort of half-pipe profile in the slide. It would have been great to have more pictures of all that being built, but i gues for now that can all remain a mystery. As an somewhat less informative alternative to all that detailed construction knowledge that I was hoping to share, I can at least offer this longer video of everything completed:
We had an exceptional weather year for maintaining the integrity of the castle and slides. Even near the end of the month when I made that video, everything had held up really well. By this time the sliders had really polished up the slides, and people were sliding as much as sixty feet beyond where the slides met the ice.
Being a seasonal festival out on the ice of Great Slave Lake, of course the castle has to come to an end at some point. The last day of the festival was March 28, and teardown started shortly after. I always marble at how quickly the castle comes apart, after spending two months building it. On March 31, most of the manual work of disassembly was done by about eight people in about five hours. On April 2, the excavator showed up, and by the end of the day, many of the castle buildings were removed, and that was it for the slides too. Here you can see severed slides across the ruins of the courtyard.
I got a message from Benji Straker (from the bands Hughes and Gnarwhal, among others) back in early March about filming a few songs for his show “From the Penalty Box”. We got together the following week, and he and Ben Cornell did a nice job filming this and putting it together. Many thanks to the two of them!
The songs performed here are ‘The Skeena/Runnin’ Late’; a fairly new one called “Waiting for the Water Truck’; and ‘My Bacon Makin’ Baby’.
It was a real honour this year to be able to take part in my sixth Snowkings’ Winter Festival Snow Carving Symposium! This year marked the event’s tenth year.
This year, I worked with Joel Maillet (long time Snowking crew member “The Avalanche Kid”) and Graham Henning. Joel has been living out in Prince Edward Island the last few years, but makes his way back to Yellowknife when he can, either to play in the snow, or occasionally to work as a window cleaner (his and my summer careers). Graham is a friend of Joel’s from art school, a really talented sculptor with a great eye for the shapes he’s looking for. He lives in London, Ontario.
I think it was Joel’s idea to carve a piece of popcorn in snow. Graham embraced the idea and apparently spent several months exploring the essence of popcorn. He did some modelling in styrofoam as well as some practice carving on a 7X7X7 foot cube of snow down in London. Joel, for his part, apparently popped four giant bowls of popcorn before finding the quintessential piece of popped corn. This piece, which became known as “The Kernel,” he photographed from four sides as well as the top, but he also kept the original, and it became the primary reference maquette while carving the block.
“The Kernel” sat in this protective case on top of our team sign out by the carving for over three weeks, for anyone who noticed it to appreciate. I brought it home after the end of the month to take this photo, and to keep it on a shelf for all eternity.
The first day of carving (of three days in this case) involves the most moving of snow. Huge chunks and whole sections of the thousand cubic foot block of snow are sloughed off to ease the carving that is to follow.
(Olivia Mater Photo).
The Snowkings’ Snow Carving Symposium is a wonderful event bringing carvers together from around the world. This year, we had returning teams from Spain, Texas, and across Canada, as well as teams from Estonia and Finland, here for their first time. There is much more camaraderie than competitiveness, and teams are sometimes seen helping each other out. Here Graham and I are helping Larry MacFarlane (Team Sundogs) and Martin Rehak (Team Bouche-trous) to lift a heavy block of snow up onto the top of the latter team’s carving, using the scaffold plank as a lifting platform:
(Olivia Mater Photo).
By the second day, things start to take some shape. It’s already starting to look, as Graham put it, ‘popcorny’:
(Olivia Mater Photo). I should note that although the original carving block measured 10X10X10 feet, we were allowed to add to its original size by a certain amount. It would not be very obvious after the fact, but we did add some snow blocks to the carving to make it nearly twelve feet long. In this picture, it’s the lower “lobe” of the popcorn, directly in front of the scoop shovel. Later, we also added an unpopped kernel near the back.
By the end of the third day, we were mostly done, which gave us plenty of time on the fourth morning to focus on some finishing details (a nice pace of work compared to some of my previous carvings, which have felt like non-stop endurance marathons of carving). Here is “POP!” as we presented it in its finished form:
I showed the following night picture to my four-year-old daughter. She said “daddy you didn’t carve a popcorn, you carved a skeleton [skull]”:
We had a nice cold March here in Yellowknife, and as of April 1, most of the carvings are still holding up very well. Often they droop and warp in amazing ways as the weight of the snow bends them downward over time. The changes to “POP!” have been very subtle so far. Here’s how it looked on March 31:
Also on March 31, here’s “Tom”, as carved by the Spanish team “Barcelona Forever!” All weekend, they were playing Tom Waits music while they worked, but it took me a couple of days to see what they were actually doing. It turned out beautifully and has held up really well, with the exception that there was a wall behind his back that started to lean too much and had to be partially removed.
In the early part of the Snowking castle-building season, I sometimes have a bit of time to do some creative carving before starting on my main project, which is overseeing the construction of the ice slides.
This year, King Marty One-Boot asked me to come up with a design for the backstage entrance to the castle. Without too much thought, I drew up a sketch for a simple way of building that section of wall and door. Then I took a day off. What I had drawn as a three-foot thick wall ended up being nearly six feet thick. The door was placed about where I expected, but the windows were a bit different than I’d envisioned, and much deeper in the snow. With a bit of grumbling, I took it upon myself to start working on revealing the windows and door that were buried in the wall. Snowking suggested cutting some of the snow off of the corners of the exterior face. Before long, I felt pretty committed to the project of carving the entire backstage entrance area. After a few days of carving, I decided that it was “finished enough,” and moved on to other jobs.
January 16, 2026. Early in the shaping of the wall and doorway. I had already built the stairway and “loading dock” in the foreground, and people were already using the entrance regularly, so I had to do some creative scaffolding to access the upper wall efficiently. Here you can see the rustic plumb bob (nail tied to string) that I sometimes use to get vertical lines.
January 16, 2026. About three hours after the earlier photo, I was happy with the upper part of the wall. It could always be touched up by ladder if needed.
A typical view of the castle from the shoreline of Great Slave Lake in the early part for construction. This is how far along it was on January 20, 2026. Some of Mr. Freeze’s ice works are in the foreground.
Addendum, April 2, 2026: The excavator arrived for teardown; here’s how the back door looked around 4:30PM:
I was lucky enough recently to have my song selected for the 2022 Western Arctic Moving Pictures 48 Hour Music Video Competition!
Nancy MacNeill and Maia Lepage put together this great little video capturing some elements of Yellowknife summer as well as the legendary Gold Range Hotel (brief cameo of Ernie Constant).
I want to take a minute and thank some of the folks who have given me some radio play lately! First and foremost, Samantha Stuart at Cabin Radio here in Yellowknife, who will be featuring From the Railyard to the Woodyard on her show, Cabin Country, on Tuesday night, January 26, 2021, from 8-10 PM (with repeat broadcast on Saturday January 30, 5-7). We will be talking about the album, life in Yellowknife, and some other stories…
Also a quick thanks and shout out to Alberto Basarte in Spain and his show Blue Moon Kentucky, and Sean Burns from Boots and Saddle on CKUW in Winnipeg, for including me on their shows!
Just want to say thanks to Brian Saunderson down in Kamloops, BC, for featuring me on his online radio show, Hurtin For Real! Episode 932, part 2, week of January 29, 2021.
A couple years ago on HFR #777, I did a show of all songs about Stompin' Tom Connors. There's a new song that would have fit right in, off Ryan McCord's brand new record… https://t.co/Rix1rtJWRe Rest of the album's good, too. Solid twang from Yellowknife. #Yellowknifepic.twitter.com/qpKO9eZ3db
Back in 2014, or maybe 2013, just minutes before I was getting on the plane to California to record my first album, Janna Graham and I went out to the ice of Great Slave Lake to make some sound recordings of vintage ice saws cutting the ice. Now, after six years, Terry Woolf has put together this beautiful video of my friends and I harvesting ice for Snowking’s Winter Festival. I believe that the footage is shot by Terry, Anthony Foliot and Wade Carpenter, all on their phones. Thank you Terry!
Ryan McCord 