Yahoo Finance Winnipeg playing host to first Great Ice Show in 2016
Winnipeg's notoriously cold winter may soon become its greatest advantage if three local hoteliers have anything to say about it.
Beginning in mid-January and running until mid-March, the Great Ice Show arrives as Winnipeg's first winter festival. Featuring world class ten foot ice sculptures, two 20-foot dinosaur toboggan slides made of snow and one 15-foot polar bear head where kids can toboggan out the polar bear's mouth, the inaugural festival promises to give families a reason to come out of the house this winter.
“When I was young, it didn't matter how cold it was, I was so happy to go out every day and have some fun. But these days there are very limited choices for Winnipeg's kids in the wintertime, so we planned to do this as safe place where kids can have fun with their parents and enjoy their family time,” says Andy Zhao, president of Canadian Icetival Inc., general manager at the Hampton Inn by Hilton Winnipeg Airport and one of the three local hotel magnates organizing the Great Ice Show.
Traditionally Winnipeg's winters are some of the coldest on record anywhere in the world. On December 31, 2013 temperatures reached a chilling -37 degrees celsius – colder than the North Pole and parts of the surface of Mars at the time. These kinds of temperatures make any kind of tourism during the winter months in the province nearly impossible, so Zhao, along with Paul Kostas, president and owner of the Humphry Inn & Suites, and Vivian Jiao, the same hotel's general manager, hope to change that by giving the city an excuse to celebrate its long and gruelling winter.
“Winter has been a long time disadvantage for Winnipeg and we want to turn that disadvantage into an advantage by producing a product that Winnipeg's people can be really proud of,” says Zhao.
Made in China
That product was inspired by The Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, which has run in Harbin, Heilongjiang province in China from January 5th to February 25th every year since 1984. It's the biggest ice and snow sculpture festival in the world where artists routinely create ice and snow sculptures reaching 80 to 85 metres tall.
“My business partner Vivian and I have a Chinese background and if you're from China everyone knows about the festival in Harbin. Harbin has almost the same latitude as Winnipeg and before the festival, no one wanted to go to Harbin for the same reason no one wants to go to Winnipeg – long winters and short summers – but now the Harbin festival attracts over a million people from all over the world and brings in $1 billion to the local economy every year,” says Zhao.
The ice and snow sculptures won't be that big for the inaugural year of the Great Ice Show, but those same artists from Harbin are bringing their 30 years of experience to Winnipeg and building a 40-foot ice slide to look like the Manitoba Legislature Building. The artists will also be on hand the entire festival to look over and repair each structure as the festival extends into the spring.
“On a daily basis those artists are going inspect every building before we open it to make sure it's 100 per cent safe for our guests and as we head into the spring time, the artists will start to inspect each building on an hourly basis,” says Zhao.
In addition to epic ice and snow structures that will all be lit with LED lights, including a 600 square-foot ice bar where parents can enjoy some food and drinks while their children play, the festival will have other forms of entertainment like ice bumper cars, a warming house with face-painting and hot chocolate, and fireworks or live music shows on alternating weekends.
Asian Innovation meets Canadian Culture
Four years in the making, 2016 marks the year everything from the venue to the logistics has finally been locked down. Taking place in the Forks' National Historical Site, the Great Ice Show hopes to set itself apart from other winter festivals in Canada, such as Quebec's world-renowned Winter Carnival and Ottawa's Winterlude Festival.
“We're not going to compete with anybody else in Canada in respect to any winter events. Keep in mind, the one in Quebec is about an ice hotel and the Great Ice Show is more structured around the Chinese technology even though the sculptures will celebrate Canadians and Canadian culture,” says Paul Kostas.
Kostas's group hopes to have a leg up on other winter festivals across Canada by importing the over 30 years experience these Harbin ice artists have creating massive ice structures full of LED lights. Many of the sculptures in Harbin look translucent thanks to the de-ionized water from the nearby Songhua River where all of the ice is taken from and the Great Ice Show hopes to do the same thing, taking their ice from the nearby Red River.
A major thing Quebec's Winter Carnival does have over the Great Ice Show is their legendary anthropomorphic snowman mascot Bonhomme. But as the Great Ice Show gets bigger, the organizers hope it will have just as iconic a mascot as well.
“The biggest structure in our festival is the dinosaur slide, so I suppose we may adopt that as our mascot,” says Kostas.
But it doesn't necessarily end there.
“We might use a dinosaur this year, but we don't mind letting the kids of Winnipeg decide what they want for a mascot because it's their event,” says Zhao.
If you're a kid wanting to get in on that, ticket prices are $15 for you and $25 for your parents and even though tickets have not gone on sale and a firm start date has not been announced, Zhao and his partners promise the Great Ice Show will change the face of a once brutal season in central Canada.
“Winnipeg has a great location – we're in the centre of the country -- and weather-wise we're the perfect city to have this – there's no city better, so we want to use this opportunity to let the kids have fun, let the families have quality time and promote Canadian culture at the same time,” says Zhao.
