The winter machine

Beautiful sculpture and this years first place winner.  My guess is with the warm up yesterday it doesn’t look the same today.

Happy ground hogs day.

Rice Park - Winter Carnival

The St. Paul Winter carnival provides a lot of photo opportunities.  I spent much of last weekend outside.  One of my favorite winter events is the ice carving contest.  The sculptures are amazing.

Ice dam

I took this photo last year.  We had such a brutal winter and there was so much damage.  This isn’t my house but we had ice dams like this and our roof was damaged.  Not much snow this year so far and the snow on the roof already melted.  It will be below freezing today but temperatures are above average.

Ice Dam

Many of us will remember this winter long after it is gone, all we will have to do is look up at our ceilings and see the water stains.  #wintersucks!

Robert Street Bridge - Ice Floats

Ice floats along the Mississippi River and under the Robert Street bridge.  The shipping season is over and so is the boating season.  Winter has it’s own kind of beauty and maybe some day I will stay outside long enough to see it.

Ducks on Ice

I don’t know how the little critters do it.  They take a swim in the ices river and then take a nap on the ice.

Ice Dragon

It was a strange weekend it rained.  I can’t recall ever having rain during the winter carnival.  It was hard to get photos of the ice carving contest held in Rice Park so I didn’t get many.  This was my favorite sculpture.  I watched them starting it on Friday and it still kind of looked like a block of ice.   Too bad we can’t keep it.

Ice

This is the center piece for the ice carving contest, which is part of the St. Paul winter carnival.  I decided to go to Rice Park and check it out before the ice sculptures were complete because no matter how cold it is here in the winter we can pretty much count on it being above freezing within a day of the time that the ice sculptures are completed.  Once they are ruined and partially melted we go back into the deep freeze.  This year we had some above freezing temps, hence the puddle in the photo and then it rained all day, and then it froze.  I will try to get photos of the completed sculptures before they melt.

Mother nature has a way of adding some interesting decorations.