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.