Chipping away on a mild winter's day

This past Friday afternoon I was de-stressing from a hard week of school and assignments by taking a stroll down Main St. I stopped at Wild Joe’s Coffee Spot for a hot snickerdoodle latte, peeked in at Vargo’s Jazz City and Books to check for a new poetry collection and continued making my way east down Main. As I passed Soroptomist Park, my eye was caught by a man creating an ice sculpture of a sockeye salmon. This man was Chris Berryhill, and he and his wife Melanie Mangione were both volunteers this past Saturday, Jan. 30, at the 5th Annual Sweet Pea Ice Sculpture Competition. 

The competition is sponsored by the Sweet Pea Festival, a festival of the arts born in 1977 out of the community’s desire to celebrate the arts. According to their website, “The group dedicates themselves to staging a three-day Bozeman arts festival as a ‘celebration of creativity’ among area artists and community.”

In an interview with the Exponent, Berryhill explained that carvers signed up for slots in the competition on a first-come-first-serve basis, battling for a chunk of 300 pound ice and a space in the socially distanced set up around the park. When asked who all was participating Berryhill said, “There’s a few carvers that have been here before, a few professional ice sculptors, two teams of culinary students, because ice sculpture is part of the culinary education. So, the students came here yesterday, saw the demonstration and came back to form two teams and compete. There are also a couple of other random people competing today, some who have shown up [in past years] because we had space available and they tried it out and liked it and have kept coming back.”

Berryhill explained that sculptors show up to competitions with an original idea for their creation, one that does not require pre approval from the Sweet Pea Festival volunteers. The ice is supplied by The Ice House in Bozeman and is delivered in 300 pound blocks for each team to utilize. 

The participants had between 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. to carve their sculptures, which were then judged and announced at 3:30 p.m. “There are two different thoughts on judging. One of them is sort of a national judging criteria from a group called NICA (National Ice Carvers Association), but we don’t do that!” explained Mangione. “Some of the stuff we look for is, does it still look like the block but maybe a little smaller - so use of ice, overall difficulty of the subject and whether it’s pleasing to the eye.” 

Upon finishing their work, sculptors chose a color to backlight their piece with for display. Each sculpture is still on display in the park and will stay there until they melt, so hurry down and check them out this week!