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.

Ok, here’s what we really look like:

(Olivia Mater Photo)

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 Kernal,” 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 Kernal” 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.