Ice, ice baby: Cripple Creek brings back its beloved ice sculpture festival!

Cripple Creek 2026 Ice Festival

CRIPPLE CREEK, Colo. (KKTV) - In Cripple Creek, Colorado, it’s all about ice, ice baby!

Ice sculptures, ice slides, big blocks of ice, little blocks of ice, little chards of ice spraying from a chainsaw -- if you’ve been wondering where winter was, it can be found on Bennett Avenue!

Saturday marked the first day of the annual Cripple Creek Ice Festival. Through Feb. 22, elite ice carvers from all over the country will be creating ice masterpieces along Cripple Creek’s main drag, transforming Bennett Avenue into a winter wonderland. The event is one of Cripple Creek’s biggest and is expected to bring 60,000 people to town.

“It’s one of the most unique events up here of its kind,” said Marie Rieger, director of marketing and events for the city of Cripple Creek. “We have snow carving in other towns, but as far as, like, Colorado, this is one of the only ice festivals with actual ice carving.”

While the finished sculptures are magnificent, watching them emerge from the ice is part of the fun! Sculptors will be working street-side throughout the festival, and the public is invited to cheer them on!

“It’s not just the sculptures you’re going to see. You’re going to actually watch the chainsaws working, the chisels working, these people performing their magic right in front of you,” said Keith Martin, owner of SNICE Carvings and a long time Ice Festival participant.

Watch Martin give me a mini lesson in chiseling:

“There are many, many things that are really special about this event,” Martin told me. “It’s one of those special places in Colorado in the southern states that you get a chance to work with ice this big. It’s fun. We get to do things that our imagination is allowed to be limitless with.”

From that limitless imagination -- and tens of thousands of pounds of ice -- festivalgoers over the next several days can expect to see an array of frozen creations, from animals to pyramids to an entire K-Pop concert made from ice!

“We have a tribute to the monks who are walking from Texas to D.C.,” Rieger told me of one of the sculptures. “[The sculptor] wanted to go visit the monk during their walk, but he couldn’t because of this festival. So he wanted to pay tribute to them. It’s going to be a heart with a dove in the middle with hands holding it up to signify just love and hope that we need, and then they’re doing life-size monks as well. It’s just incredible!”

“The sculpting part is the easy part,” Martin said. “The construction part is the endurance sport part. Each one of these blocks weigh about 300 pounds. We have 60 of them in the [ice] slide. And we have to move each one of those one by one.”

Check out the ice slide in the video below! This is one of the interactive sculptures the public is invited to use!

And because the artists will be working every day, this is one festival where each day will genuinely be more spectacular than the one before. By the closing weekend, Feb. 21-22, visitors are likely to see as many as three dozen finished ice sculptures and several smaller ones from the speed carving competition.

That competition is one of the highlights of Ice Fest!

“We don’t tell them the theme until 30 minutes before they start carving. So they can try to make a plan, but they don’t know what we’re going to ask them to sculpt. So there’s bleachers out there and everyone cheers them on,” Rieger said.

“The speed carving is actually a really fun event,” Martin told me. “It does take a lot of our focus off of the bigger sculptures that we’re really passionate about doing. But it’s really fun to come down and put your creativity and your experience on the line. And you’re carving against a lot of really good people, and you have a short amount of time, and you’re trying to think quick how you can pull off something that’s bigger and a little bit better than the next person. Then you turn around and this guy’s pulling off something that you never even thought of. So the speed part really puts us all in that moment of we have to focus. We have to see what we’re going to do, and we push our limits, see how we do it.”'

The first speed carving competition took place on opening day; the next competitions will be Feb. 21 at 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m.

One question many have: with how mild this winter has been, how is the ice staying, well, icy? A combination of shade from the buildings, insulation, moving blankets around, and even doing some carving at night.

“They’ve really been battling with the elements!” Rieger said.

Ice Festival is open every day from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. between now and Feb. 22, with the exception of Tuesday, Feb. 21, when there will be another big ice delivery. It’s free and completely open to the public.

Attendees can also enjoy vendors, food, live music and more. But the main show is the incredible ice art.

“It’s a huge, just wonderful scene that you would never think could happen out of blocks of ice,” Rieger said.