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‘We make weird things with snow’

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2010 Lake Geneva Winterfest

Highlights from the 2010 U.S. Nationals Snow Sculpting Competition in Lake Geneva, Wis. Click to play

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2010 U.S. National Snow Sculpting Competition

Sculptors from around the country are in Lake Geneva this week for the U.S. Nationals Snow Sculpting Competition, part of the city's annual Winterfest celebration.

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Adrian Tans, l, and Michael Nedell use wood saws to slice a block of snow off their cylinder in downtown Lake Geneva. Tans' and Nedell's Vermont based team is carving a robot and a monkey locked in a lasar gun battle as it's entry in the annual Lake Geneva contest. Bill Olmsted/staff.

LAKE GENEVA — Mike Tendal has already shed a jacket on the shivery grounds outside the Riviera this February morning. Bundled in a couple of sweatshirts, heavy-duty coveralls and work gloves, he’s still working up a sweat digging into the cylindrical block of snow that will soon take the shape of kids playing on monkey bars.

Tendal, part of the three-member Team Iowa that’s participating in Winterfest, a family festival that features a snow sculpting competition, said the hardest part of his job is “the labor.”

He uses vacation time from his rental business to sculpt snow at competitions like Winterfest — something he’s been doing for about six years.

“Hypothetically, it’s my vacation,” Tendal said. “You could say this is getting away from work, but it is work.”

For Tendal, the competition keeps his blood pumping. Members of the 15 teams at Winterfest are culled from the most talented — usually winning a snow-sculpting competition in their home state to get here. And then for a week these grounds — filled with ladders, boxes of professionally crafted and makeshift tools, as well as plenty of snow — are home.

Sculptors come from places where winter isn’t for wimps: Wisconsin, New York, Maine, Nebraska, Alaska.

Don Berg, executive director of the National U.S. Snow Sculpting Competition, and Winterfest organizer, is a Montana native who used to climb out of the second-story window of his childhood home after a heavy snowfall.

“They probably started making snowmen as children and it grew from there,” he said of the snow sculptors. “It’s passion that draws them.”

Some team members are related, like cousins Scott, Dick and John Mogren of the Minnesota team, who won first place in sculpting at St. Paul’s Winter Carnival. Mogren Development, a company run by Scott’s brother, helps pay for some of the expenses involved in the competition.

Others are just good friends, like Brooke Monte, Michael Nedell and Adrian Tans, who form Team Vermont.

“We usually come with just beer money and $100 to spend,” Monte said.

“Some guys go to Vegas. Some people go hunting. We make weird things with snow,” Nedell said, noting that their sculpture is a robot fighting a monkey with lasers.

Monte, a baker; Nedell, a Web program designer; and Tans, an illustrator, said they don’t mind fitting vacation time around snow competitions. It also helps to have supportive employers and spouses — although Nedell said his wife’s Facebook page lists her as a snow-sculpting widow.

It’s a term Michele Brown is familiar with. “I’ve been a ‘weasel widow’ since 1992,” she said.

This month Brown took a week’s leave of absence from the Air Force, where she’s on active duty, to join her husband, Bill, a stay-at-home dad, on the Illinois team, the Kilted Snow Weasels.

This is her second year, but her husband’s been involved in snow sculpting for 19 years, and team member Randy Tackett for 24.

Tackett, married with two kids, follows a pre-event ritual at home.

“I have to make sure everything’s OK before I leave — laundry’s done, dishes are washed,” he said. “Then when I get home I do it all again.”

The team has faced the usual sculpting hazards, like falls from ladders and collisions with heavy wayward blocks of snow. The day before the judging can mean long hours with little sleep.

Then there’s the decision on the theme of the sculpture, which this year is a grim reaper weasel dubbed “The Grim Sweeper.”

“We discuss the theme all year,” said Bill Brown.