Making a snow festival sculpture takes a lot more work than making a snowman; one cannot simply roll around a snowball until it is meters across and start scraping away, because the snow would get too dirty, too inconsistently packed, and too heavy to move.  So how do snow sculptures at the festival start out?  I followed these workers around Sun Island Park, home of Harbin’s Snow Sculpture Art Fair, to find out.

Despite Harbin’s plentiful snowfall, the snow used at the festival is man-made to keep it clean and consistent.  Once the snow-making machines in the park have churned out a small mountain, that snow is shoveled onto the back of a truck and taken to where the sculpture will rest.  Workers then tie together four walls of wooden boards and fill the resulting box with snow, allowing it to settle and form a block as shown on the right.  To make the block taller, they tie together a second group of walls on top of the first and fill that with snow as well, as the workers are doing here.

On this day, blocks of snow were being prepared for a snow-sculpting competition.  Each team of competitors would start with a block about four meters tall and three meters on a side.  Here, workers put the finishing touches on a block, having just completed another one behind them.

The snow-sculpting competition at the Snow Sculpture Art Fair lasts a week; participants have seven days to complete their sculptures, and this was day one.  Here, a team from a local college begins work on its block of snow.  Teams from all over the world come to Harbin to participate in this competition.

The results can be stunning.  These sculptures, started with the same kind of snow blocks as those shown in the previous photographs, appeared along the entryway to the snow festival.

And what about the ice?  Preparing those structures for the festival takes much more work.  Nature provides the ice-making machine in the form of nearby Songhua River, which remains frozen nearly half the year.  Huge saws cut thick blocks of ice from the river, and the blocks are then brought to Sun Island Park just north of the river by truck.  Forklifts are required to move the heavy blocks around, as shown here.  Despite its precarious tilt, the truck didn’t tip over, and the blocks didn’t slide off - not during this trip, anyway.

The ice blocks are then stacked nearby for later use.  Eventually they will be carved into sculptures, or cut into smaller blocks and used to create giant structures either here at the Snow Sculpture Art Fair or over at the Ice and Snow World event nearby.  Because the temperature will stay below freezing for at least two more months, the blocks can be left outdoors.

Some of those ice blocks were needed this very day.  In another section of the park, workers were constructing a large restaurant out of ice, and they needed to cut those huge blocks down to a manageable size to create a wall.  This is the saw they used to cut the ice.

Though it might not look very big after being cut, this block of ice required five people to tug it across the packed snow.  This was going to be one solid restaurant.

In front of the restaurant, an artist sculpts entryway decorations using larger blocks of ice.  His was not an enviable task; making one sculpture takes quite some time, and he had two more blocks behind him to go - and the temperature was well below freezing.  Needless to say, it takes a hearty bunch of workers to put together the ice and snow sculptures of Harbin’s huge festival every year.