Travel

BEAUTIFUL FREEZE PLACES NOW

We’ve gathered some of the most beautiful places to go to experience the most beautiful freeze right now. From ice castles, to frozen waterfalls, and festivals. Bundle up and head out to these spectacular times.

Photo: Courtesy of Ice Castles. Ice castles.

While we spent last week at the Sundance Film Festival, we wanted to share some of the other beauty we found around Utah. And we found lots!

Winter is sweet here. And to make it even more gorgeous, they started to build giant ice castles in the town of Midway that will blow you away at first sight.

The Ice Castle is made completely of pure ice and snow -- over 30,000,000 pounds of it! A new castle is built every year, starting in the fall.

Photo: Courtesy of Ice Castles. Ice Castle in Midway Utah.

Brent Christensen began creating Ice Castles a few years ago after spending several winters building elaborate slides and ice towers for his kids in his backyard in Utah. As he elaborated upon them further, they became monumental projects.

Elaborate sprinkler systems spray water onto metal racks to produce thousands of icicles that are harvested and stuck to the ground around sprinkler heads, which spray more water, growing beautiful shapes, towers, tunnels, archways, and caves, over the course of a few weeks.

Photo: Courtesy of Ice Castles. Ice castles in Midway Utah.

The castles will continue growing during the winter. Walls that stand 8 to 20 feet could reach 40 to 60 feet by mid-season. The Midway Ice Castle will be on view until the ice melts, sometime around March or April.

There are two additional Ice Castle sites: At the base of Loon Mountain, in Lincoln, NH and in Breckenridge, CO.

There are 58 towers on the Lincoln castle, plus a waterfall and an enclosed slide. At night, the castles are lit by color-changing LED lights embedded in the ice.

The Ice Castles are a side job for Christensen. He also runs a small engine repair shop in Hawaii.

Photo: Courtesy of The National Park Service. Ice Caves on Apostle Island.

LAKE SUPERIOR ICE CAVES

Thanks to the Polar Vortex’s deep freeze, the Apostle Islands Sea Caves, and the water surrounding them, are frozen. For the first time in over five years, you can trek a mile, across the thick ice of the frozen Lake Superior, from the mainland of Wisconsin, to see their beauty.

The caves are one among the most unique in the world. They sit on 21 islands formed from sandstone over a billion years ago.

Gorgeous icicles hang, like stalactites, from the cave ceilings. The floor of the caves are made of clear ice, so you can see the lake bed below.

Photo: J. Voitus. Niagara Falls.

FROZEN WATER FALLS

Waterfalls take on a new beauty when they are frozen. The rush and power, stopped in mid-gush, take on new colors and shapes. The bigger the waterfall, the more dramatic it is as a kinetic ice sculpture.

Niagara Falls, one of the biggest, doesn’t usually fully freeze. But this year, with the Polar Vortices passing through, it’s been cold enough to stop motion.

Photo: Jason. Frozen Minnehaha Falls, Minnesota.

Minnehaha Falls is a 53-foot (16 meter) waterfall located in Minneapolis in Minnehaha Park. It is fed by the 22-mile long Minnehaha Creek, a tributary of the Mississippi River.

Due to the extremely cold temperatures in the area during the winter months, the falls freeze, creating a dramatic cascade of ice that can last well into the spring.

Photo: Joel Anderson. Hell’s Angel, Cody, Wyoming.

If you want to experience the beauty of a frozen waterfall up close and personal, you might want to try climbing one. Just grab an ice axe and some crampons and head to Cody, Wyoming to take on the Hell’s Angel Falls.

The South Fork Valley, 30 miles outside Cody, Wyoming, is the go-to spot for many ice climbers. It sits at a 6,500 foot elevation, with 11,000 foot peaks on either side. The temperatures fluctuate a lot between freezing and thawing, creating some of the highest concentrations of ice routes and prized stout pillars in the country.

Photo: Christian Pondella. Eidfjord, Norway.

Eidfjord, a municipality in the county of Hordaland, Norway, is home to beautiful icy cascades. Lush, aqua frozen curtains spill down, tempting the climbers to climb up.

The Vøringsfossen waterfall has a free fall of 182 m from part of Europe's largest mountain plateau, Hardangervidda.

Photo: Courtesy of China Access Travel. Harbin International Ice Festival.

Building a city out of ice is a very zen-like experience. It is beautiful, painstaking , and temporary. You build it up, only to let it go.

Each year, for thirty years now, in the Heilongjiang province, of northeast China, more than 7,000 workers create an ice city, spanning 6.5 million square feet, for the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.

Photo: Courtesy of On the go Tours. Harbin International Ice Festival.

Harbin is the coldest city in China, with winter temperatures dropping as low as -36 F. So it makes sense for the city dwellers to embrace ice and snow -- 180,000 cubic meters of ice chunks pulled from the nearby Songhua River, along with 150,000 cubic meters of man-made snow, to be more precise.

This year’s festival includes ice-replicas of the Roman Colosseum, the Empire State Building, and the Hallgrimskirkja church in Reykjavik, Iceland.

It also features a 787-foot ice slide, ice structures you can walk through, and a reproduction of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s enormous floating Rubber Duck.

The festival runs until the end of February.

Photo: Courtesy of Emacswiki. Icicles.