Ice Castle

We saw a clip on the news about an ice castle that was being built not too far from home earlier this week and we thought that we might go check it out over the weekend if the temperatures stayed cold enough for it to survive.  The castle is just under 2 hours north of us in Lincoln, NH and the temperatures at home were forecast to stay in the 20’s throughout the week so we figured the castle would easily survive.  We left home at about 2:30 Saturday afternoon figuring that the castle would be much nicer lit up at night.  We made only one quick stop on the way up at a rest area and we found ourselves approaching the exit just after 4:30.  Traffic was backed up in the right lane of the highway for about a mile before the exit so we stayed on the interstate for one more exit, then backtracked via back roads to the entrance.  It was immediately clear to us that the parking lot for the ice castle was pure gridlock so we parked across the street at McDonald’s, bought a coffee to make us a paying customer, thus giving us a legal spot to park.  We then walked a quarter mile or so to the ice castle.  Traffic heading into the parking lot was not moving at all and once in the parking lot there were not really many parking spaces so parking across the street seemed like a good call.  We could have easily been sitting in traffic for an hour to get into the place.  Once we got past the parking lot the line of people waiting in line was pretty bad too.  The line stretched about a football field’s length out from the building where you buy tickets.  Inside the building it snaked around and we quickly realized that we would likely be standing there for quite some time.  We did notice that the line for pre-bought tickets was pretty much non-existent so we got on our phones, went to their website and gladly paid the additional $2 per ticket processing fee essentially to skip the line.  We had our email confirmation; stepped out of the long line,  proceeded to the pre-bought ticket window and we were in the ice castle in no time at all.

The construction of the castle involves sprinkler systems that spray water onto metal racks to produce thousands of icicles. The icicles are then harvested and stuck to the ground around sprinkler heads, where they are drenched in water and grow in all kinds of shapes depending on the temperature and wind.  Over time the icicles continue to grow and depending on the placement of the sprinklers, tunnels and passageways develop, making for an elaborately built castle.  When they add lighting inside of the ice it makes it look really cool in the dark.