Ice Castles in Silverthorne, Colorado: How the Icicle Palaces Are Built

Silverthorne, Colorado, is where Brent Christensen’s Ice Castles built their first commercial castles: walk-through palaces of icicles with towers, tunnels and arches, lit in shifting colours after dark. These photographs from the early Silverthorne builds show what a few weeks of freezing nights, sprinklers and patient hands can create.

How the Ice Castles are built

The idea began in Christensen’s yard in Utah, where he built an ice castle for his children to play in. After a sprinkler-built mound and a failed wooden frame, he made an igloo of ice blocks, sprayed it with water and fused icicles onto it. That became the method:

• Crews grow thousands of icicles under sprinklers every day.
• The icicles are placed by hand around the structure and sprayed again so they fuse together.
• The growth is guided and trimmed, a little like shaping a bonsai tree.
• A build takes three to four weeks of cold weather, 20 to 50 workers and several thousand hours of labour.

Walls can rise from about 15 to 50 feet (roughly 4.5 to 15 metres), and a castle may cover nearly three-quarters of an acre.

Tunnels, slides and coloured lights

Inside, visitors wander through towers, arches and narrow tunnels, past a fountain and down a slide you crawl into. Climbing on the ice is not allowed. By day, sunlight shines through the thinner edges of the ice; at night, embedded white and coloured lights change hue and turn the whole castle into a lantern. The photographs above show both moods, from pastel daylight to warm twilight and illuminated arches after dark.

The YouTube film-maker devinsupertramp toured one of the castles with his camera; his video is below.

Silverthorne, Dillon and other locations

After Silverthorne, the Colorado castle moved to Breckenridge and later to Dillon Town Park, where it opened on 21 December 2018. The company has since announced its return to Silverthorne, at The Outlets at Silverthorne, about 67 miles (108 km) west of downtown Denver. Ice Castles has also built in Cripple Creek, Colorado; Woodstock, New Hampshire; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Edmonton, Canada, and in 2014 it built one at Loon Mountain in Lincoln, New Hampshire.

When to visit the Ice Castles

Opening depends entirely on the weather. A castle may open in late December, is almost always open through January and can last into early March, typically six to eight weeks in total. Tickets are sold in advance, so book before you drive up. Go at dusk if you can, to see the castle in daylight and then under the lights. Dress for a long, cold walk: insulated boots, gloves and layers.

For more frozen architecture, see other uses of snow and ice in architecture and a smaller backyard ice construction.

Related reading

• Colorado Snowboarding with Hofgaard, Bittner, Botner and Helgason
• A Lake Louise Snowboard Lap with Blayne Campbell
• Valdez Heli-Skiing: H2O Guides in the Chugach
• Abraham Lake’s Ice Bubbles: Layers beneath the Surface

Sources