THE ICE CASTLES AT SILVERTHORNE

About

ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE: The Ice Castles are miraculously made entirely out of ice with no supporting substructure. Their beauty lies in their organic, ever-evolving nature. Their changing ice formations are dynamic, larger than life, and something entirely new and unique.

When you come to the Ice Castles, you will pay the entrance fee and then continue walking upon groomed walking paths through arches and past towers composed of various types of ice formations.  Visitors who come during the day are allowed to return in the evening of the same day, and experience the Ice Castles again at night.  We expect to have embedded over 200 compact florescent lights throughout the ice walls and towers.

This creates an amazing and entirely unique evening experience as approximately 360,000 lumens of light emit from nearly 3,000,000 gallons of ice.  Come see for yourself the deep, glacial aquamarine blues and whites of the ice castles at the daytime and the illuminated ethereal greens and blues of the evening.

History:  After moving his family from California to Utah in 2002, Brent Christensen was searching for new outdoor winter activities for his children. One year he created an ice skating rink in the backyard. A year later he created various formations of icicles. After that he started experimenting with icicles to create a large ice formation in his front yard. His children called it “an ice castle,” and the name stuck.  He built into it a cave, tunnels, and a huge slide with a bank turn on to an ice skating rink.

People began driving by the Christensen’s home just to see the unique ice structure in the front yard. The following winter, a local resort asked Brent if he would build a larger ice castle on the front lawn of the resort. Brent built the castle in 2009-10 and in two months the word had spread and about 10,000 people had come to see the “Ice Castle” at the Zermatt Resort. The following winter (2010-11) he built another castle in the Town Square in Midway, Utah (near  Park City, UT) and over 25,000 visitors came to see the ice castles in 2010.

About Brent, the Ice Castle Artist: Brent was born and raised in Walnut Creek, California as one of ten children.  From his childhood he has always been very creative and mechanically inclined. He developed many of these abilities while fixing and restoring cars and bicycles with his brothers.  One year he and his whole family rode those bicycles all the way from California to Utah!

When he was 19, he spent two years on an LDS mission in Boise, Idaho and was asked to learn Spanish to teach the Spanish speaking population in Boise.  He still speaks fluent Spanish. He met his sweetheart at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT and they have six children.  For Christmas when their oldest children were 4-6 years old, Brent cut two childrens’ bicycles apart, fabricated all his own parts and welded it together to make a child-sized tandem bike.  He has a patent pending for a two-wheel drive bike and a patent issued for a bike trailer suspension system used on a trailer for three that he designed to take his toddlers mountain biking with him. His six children now range from 6-23 yrs old. He loves mountain biking with his boys–White Rim and Slick Rock trails in Moab, St. George trails, and the Frozen Hog Race in Alpine.

In the summer Brent spends his time operating a family business, mountain biking with his children, and enjoying the beauty of the Rocky Mountains. In his spare time he invents new ways to build bicycles, small engines, and other outdoor tools.