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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Frosty fun

Ely celebrates the season during city’s annual Winter Festival

Keith Vandervort
Posted 2/3/16

ELY – Nancy Scheibe and volunteers made the Ely Winter Fest logo snow sculpture last weekend in front of the Front Porch Coffee and Tea Co. like they have for many years.

Once in a while, …

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Frosty fun

Ely celebrates the season during city’s annual Winter Festival

Posted

ELY – Nancy Scheibe and volunteers made the Ely Winter Fest logo snow sculpture last weekend in front of the Front Porch Coffee and Tea Co. like they have for many years.

Once in a while, Mother Nature has other plans.

The snow art, which depicts the design of the official EWF souvenir pin, features a howling wolf on a rock in front of a huge snowflake.

“We finished it Saturday morning and by that afternoon I was looking at the blue skies and sunshine and the climbing thermometer and started to get a little nervous,” Scheibe said. Temperatures climbed several degrees above freezing in Ely both Saturday and Sunday.

Just a couple hours later, the wolf toppled to the ground and the snowflake started to melt, literally. “I even tried to make the wolf’s leg a little larger to keep him standing,” she said.

On Monday, after cleaning up and repairing the snowflake, she had erected wooden forms to hold more snow to replace the wolf. On Tuesday she made a new wolf. “Those things happen,” she said. “We certainly can’t control the weather.”

The EWF Snow Sculpting Symposium in Whiteside Park is underway this weekend and the many snow sculptors who are in Ely from around the world should enjoy near perfect conditions to make their art with snow.

The Northern Lakes Arts Association is also sponsoring an Amateur Snow Carving Contest in the park this weekend for adults, students and area groups.