MCCALL, Idaho — The 2025 McCall Winter Carnival is one week away, but Friday officially starts the crafting and carving of one of the carnival's main attractions. We traveled up to McCall to find out what it takes to make that perfect ice sculpture.
This year’s theme is Carnival in Paradise. If you are one of the many who participate in the Ice Sculpture competition you have put a lot of thought into what your ice creation will look like.
Tyger Kime has been part of the ice sculpture competition for decades and knows from experience you better have a good plan in place before the Friday before. “Then we’ll build a platform, a big block of ice, then we’ll come in with our vision, start cutting and chopping away."
That is why it’s all smiles for organizers like McKensie Kraemer with the McCall Chamber of Commerce who adds how exciting and important it is to keep this tradition alive. “We’re really excited to see some new sculptures out. A lot of them are self-taught, they’ve seen what’s worked in the past and they’re thinking 'hey I can do that' so they’re self-teaching themselves and now sharing their wisdom with other people so we’re seeing a new generation of snow sculptures being built."
Just ask long-time Artic artist Angela Staup, who was excited to share this story with me. “This year I had a lady reach out to me and she wanted to get into doing it. She works at another business in town. She wants to learn how to do it, so she asked if she could join us to get some tips so she could build one at another business."
I can’t wait to see what Stoup and Kime’s Carnival in Paradise sculpture next to the Razzle Dazzle Gift Shop will look like. And sometimes it’s up for interpretation what exactly it’s all about.
I asked Kime about that. “Do you ever have anybody come up, looking at it and trying to figure out what you got going here?"
He said, "I feel the year we did the Yeti, that one was pretty festive, he was so big and so much going on we had to tell people what was exactly going on."
And there will be plenty going on in McCall starting next Friday, Feb. 21. View our full McCall Winter Carnival Event Guide here.
