Fire and Ice: Saskatoon ice sculpture brings the heat

It took two 12-foot dump trailers and about a week for Mel Thompson to bring life to “Snow-micron” the dragon.

The bright blue snow and ice sculpture is about 30-feet-long, five-foot-eight-inches high, and takes up Thompson’s entire front yard in the 2400 block of Cairns Avenue.

“Seeing as how the one last year was named Snow-vid, I thought it only fitting that this one be named Snow-micron,” she laughed.

She was initially inspired by simply looking out her front window one day, and thinking her snowbank kind of looked like a dragon.

“I just made into one and then each year I tried to make it a little bit bigger, a little bit more detailed. Last year someone saw it and put it on their Instagram and just blew up. So this year, I kind of felt I should one-up it,” she added.

It took about a week and for Mel Thompson to build Snow-micron, the fire-breathing ice sculpture. (Lara Fominoff/650 CKOM)

While the dragon’s eyes lit up last year, this year she wanted to make it look like as though it was breathing fire. She hollowed out the nose, put in a Halloween firelight, then a smoke machine, and a screen in front of that to make it appear as though the smoke is coming out of its face.

“Everybody smiles when they come to see it. Kids are either, you know, just amazed or terrified (of it). One of the two,” she said.

She’s had dozens of curious visitors come by, take pictures, try to crawl onto the sculpture, or just admire it from afar. Thompson says it’s just something she made to make people smile.

“It’s just something to take people’s minds off the stuff that’s going on in the world right now. Something to get out to see that doesn’t require you to be around other people, and it’s free.”

The sculpture is usually lit between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.