Florida's Winter Wonderland: The Gaylord Palms' ICE! Exhibit

Winter in Florida is considered to be one of the mildest in the country. Everywhere in Florida, except at the Gaylord Palms ICE! Exhibit in Kissimmee, that is. The temperatures inside this holiday winter wonderland are kept at a chilly nine degrees farenheit to preserve the 2 million pounds of sculptured ice.

The ICE! Collection of Art

ICE! takes the art of sculpture and freezes it to prefection. Started just a few years ago, the ICE! exhibit has drawn thousands of visitors to its winter wonderland since. Each year, about eight months before the launch of a new ICE! exhibit for the holiday season, a group of approximately 40 artists from China are chosen to being designing the blueprints for the upcoming year's ICE! exhibit. Months before the detailed ice sculptures are completed, the artists are busy coordinating each individual display, while attending to detailed revisions of their plans.

Carving two million pounds of ice requires a master's work and all of the sculptors and artists are well trained. On a recent visit to ICE! I met with one of the sculptors while he was carefully adding fine details to a new exhibit piece. He smiled for a picture and said that he had been working with ice sculpturing for seventeen years. He has been traveling half way around the world from China to work with the ICE exhibit since it began.

When you enter the ICE! exhibit, a host provides each visitor with a long, heavy parka to wear. The 9 degree temperature inside the exhibit requires even more though, so I'd highly advise some gloves and a hat to get the most out of viewing. Once you enter ICE! there are different rooms to walk through, each having a different holiday theme and related ice sculptures. The ice sculptures are life size and highly detailed. They use three different types of ice and freezing processes to achieve different sculptures. Some of the ICE! exhibits are colored with paints, while others look pristine in a shiny, clear, ice finish.

The ICE! Masterpeices