Young ice sculptors test skills in contest

Spring break is when the high school kids come out to play. At least four teams are testing their skills at shaping ice during the Junior World Ice Art Championships.

This year, the youngsters range from eighth grade to 12th. Each team has a professional helper who competed in this year's contests.

The junior competition lasts until Friday, and awards will be presented at 8 p.m. Saturday.

Madi Brown and Josh Lundy, both freshmen, have set the bar high for themselves by choosing a complicated forreria-type seashell to replicate on their 3-by-5-by-4-foot ice block. They traced the shell's outline from an overhead projector and pasted the illustration onto their block. They used chain saws to carve the basic shape and have been chiseling away at the rest of their complex outline.

"My stepdad wanted me to choose something challenging but not too challenging," Brown said.

Brown lucked out with the expert help of her mom, Heather Brice, who has been competing in ice carving since 1999. This year, her teams won the multi-block realistic and single-block realistic competitions, both with underwater subjects.

Senior Grace Matthews has been competing in ice art for four years. She remembers four years ago a friend pointed out an ad in the paper for competition applications and decided to take the challenge. She has competed in single-block and multi-block competitions.

"We haven't gotten last," she said. "I think that's really good."

This year, she's solo and picked her subject the night before the competition opened, spying it on the cover of the novel her dad was reading. Matthews is creating a sculpture of a Roman warrior-looking character with pillars and an arch in the background, with only the help of professional Joanna Flores.

Flores, 27, is from Mexico but planned to stay in Fairbanks for longer than some of the other experienced carvers, so she volunteered to help a junior team.

She said she admired Matthews' ambition.

"I wasn't even thinking of carving at that young," she said.

Freshman Austin Steinke and sophomore Forrest Kates are working on a sculpture modeled after a '69 Pontiac Firebird.

Steinke and Kates said they feel like they have a good handle on ice carving tools, mostly chisels.

"But we're not foreign to chain saws," Kates said.

Eighth-grader Anthony Mondeli and freshman Brittany Bennett decided to sculpt a Hummer after determining that a tank was too complex.

Bennett bashfully said, "I'm just here," but Mondeli insisted his partner was a great help.

The first-, second- and third-place winners will receive gift certificates on Saturday. The Ice Alaska Ice Park on Phillips Field Road is open through March 28.