CHILLY DIGS
Avisitor takes part in a preview showing of the Ice Castle at Dillon Town Park on Tuesday. The castle, which officially opens Thursday, features ice-carved tunnels, fountains, slides, frozen thrones and spiraling towers embedded with color-changing LED lights that twinkle to music.
Dan Beck moved to Silverthorne to be a ski bum seven years ago, but he hasn’t had much time to hit the slopes in the winters since.
Instead, he puts in long hours with a crew of 15 to 20 people building up and then maintaining magnificent ice castles, locking several million gallons of water into intricate mazes of tunnels, slides and half-frozen waterfalls.
“It’s kind of crazy when I look back on it,” he said during a walk-through of the then-incomplete Dillon ice castle last week.
Beck got started in the trade after seeing a “help wanted” ad at the south branch library in Silverthorne. He turned out to have knack for ice, and by the next year was a site supervisor for Ice Castles, a Utah company that builds a half-dozen castles around the country each winter.
This is the first year Ice Castles has come to Dillon, setting up shop at Town Park. Tickets are required to tour the castle. The attraction opens Thursday and will be open every day but Tuesdays through Feb. 3
There was still plenty of work to do last week, with crews still rushing to make up for time lost to an unseasonably warm start to winter.
“It’s the weather — you can’t control it,” he said with an easygoing shrug.
Beck and his crew build the castle around a network of pipes extending up into the air and ending with sprinkler heads that dribble out water. Overnight, they grow taller, while horizontal pipes drop wide curtains of icicles.
“The actual building process with the ice is pretty basic geometry, but it definitely takes some time and you’re really slow at first and all of your icicles fall down until you get the bonding technique down,” Beck said.
In open spaces within the castle, crews have set up icicle farms, or nests of hanging chain link connected to a central sprinkler. Overnight, hundreds of icicles form underneath, and in the morning, workers harvest them to use as the day’s building material.
At places where they need to build walls higher, workers will pull an icicle from a holster wrapped around their waist and use slush to bond it to the top of the ice surface. They’ll then run sections of pipe to the top of it, and by morning it will have widened it a thick column.
The operation draws about 300,000 gallons of water a day during the building phase and will use 10,000 to 30,000 gallons a day during the maintenance phase, Dillon town officials said.