HOLIDAY IN ICE

Each holiday season, the four Gaylord Hotels in the United States import about 100 master ice carvers from Harbin, China's Winter Festival to carve elaborate, life-size exhibits for the resorts.
The ICE! exhibits are a wonder to walk through, with room out of room full of sculptures where everything - even walls and stairs - are made out of ice.
ICE! gets its start months before the exhibit premieres in November, with a theme and technical drawings to plan the exhibit. The carvers start their work about 30 days before ICE! opens.
Bringing in the ice is a logistical feat in itself. Each sculpture starts as a 400-pound ice block trucked to Orlando from Adel, Georgia. The timing of the ice's arrival is carefully planned because all of the colors in the exhibit are added when the ice is frozen and not on-site.
Larry Walter, one of the show's on-site producers, said two to four trucks of ice are delivered each day, with largely clear and white ice being delivered at the beginning of the process and the colored ice coming to add the finishing touches later.
The artists start the carving with chain saws to shape the ice. Fine detail work is done with small chisels and other hand tools.