Newswise — Snow has never been this scary.
Winter Carnival is months away, but student groups at Michigan Technological University have been plotting since July to build the creepiest statues ever for this annual celebration of snow and ice.
Michigan Tech has plenty to celebrate, what with an annual snowfall of 200-plus inches providing perfect raw material for the elaborate, imaginative snow-and-ice sculptures that anchor the festival. On Feb. 8, dozens of student groups will unveil their masterworks based on the theme "Frightful Creatures with Chilling Features."
Blue Key National Honor Society organizes the event and selects a different theme every year. Some expressed concern that in 2008 frightful creatures might scare the very young, but Blue Key chapter president John Aho, a senior from Rochester, Minn., studying actuarial science and biology, said the horror factor was probably overrated. "It's really hard to make a disembodied snow statue," he notes wryly.
Starting in January, students will be out in all weather, hidden behind barriers and shaping intricate dioramas with the only material allowed: water, usually frozen. Using forms, scaffolding and snow-sculpting secrets passed down from generation to generation, they create statues up to 30 feet high in scenes as big as a suburban lot.
Alpha Sigma Tau takes Winter Carnival statue-building seriously, having nabbed first place in the sorority division four out of the last five years. Katie Harris, a senior psychology major from Ishpeming, spearheads the effort. "I spend my summers thinking about statues, trying to come up with something new. We're very competitive."
You couldn't ask for a more-challenging artistic endeavor. Last year, students battled wind chills of 30 degrees below zero.
"Under Armour [brand long underwear] is the best invention ever," Harris says. "Also those handwarmers. We put them in our boots too, since the first thing that gets cold is your toes."
Students compete in a number of statue categories, with fraternities and sororities often devoting a full month to the effort. Other groups prefer to compete in the One-Nighter division, staying up all night in one massive surge of snow sculpting.
For visitors coming to campus during Winter Carnival, it's all about the statues. For the students, it's also about ice bowling, broomball, human dogsled races, skiing, "and other fun, wintery events," Aho said.
Blue Key member Stephanie Lindstrom says it's hard to overstate the impact of the statues. "It's amazing how big they are," she says. "You just have to see them, you can't really describe them. People don't believe you when you say how big they are."
Winter Carnival will be held Feb. 6-10. For more information, visit http://bluekey.students.mtu.edu/exe/ . To see images of statues from 2007 Winter Carnival, visit http://wintercarnival.mtu.edu/statues .
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