Kiruna - The Ice Hotel

At the beginning of March Greg and I travelled to Kiruna. I took many photos, but never spent the time to go through them properly. But I have finally done so, and now I shall finally post a bit about our trip!



Most of the photos I have are from the Ice Hotel, which is located just outside of Kiruna. We went on a tour of the hotel, but did not actually spend the night there. It is really expensive to stay there, and I really don't like being cold, so that was not an option for us.









About the above photo. This was a hole in the ceiling. I am guessing it is to prevent hot air from gathering and melting the hotel prematurely.





Every year there is a competition among artists from all over the world to design rooms in the hotel out of ice or snow. The photo above (and the one of Greg & I at the top) was my most favorite room, called Solid Flow. Here is some info about the room from one of the artists.

Also, I found (thanks to #capture317) this video on the interwebs showing a time-lapse video of the construction of the room. Pretty neat.

Before & after/Day & night

The past two weekends I visited the ice festival. On the first weekend, I caught the tail-end of the sculpting of the ice sculptures. Then on the following weekend I went at night, because I had been told that the ice sculptures are lit up.

I have to say, I really liked having the ice festival in town. And I really liked that it was free. But it also made me understand why I paid to get into the Fairbanks Ice Festival. These sculptures are cool, but the caliber of those in Fairbanks was in a totally different ballpark. Also, that one was a world art festival, and there were definitely sculptors from all over, including Scandinavia, so I'm not trying to imply anything about the origins of the greatest ice sculptors. Here is an old post where I included a couple pictures of the more impressive ice festival.

The March Window

Tonight is the first night of the March launch window. The science conditions are not looking terribly promising and neither is the weather. For the past three nights there has been amazing aurora, but it is pretty much dead by now. Also, it is so windy here that the building is shaking and the water in the toilets is sloshing around a little bit.

I am realizing I haven't put too many photos in my blog lately, so I'm going to try to fix that. These pictures are in no particular order. They are just the ones I like from the past two or three weeks.


This is an ice sculpture at the World Ice Art Championship.

Today on the way to the range we were just in time for Chatanika Days. They have been doing this winter carnival of sorts for many years and apparently thousands of people come out (from where, who knows..) to attend. They have outhouse races, in which people build an outhouse on skis and then race it down the street. The finish line is actually in the parking lot, so it was very amusing when the teams would be running at the crowd of people yelling "turn! turn!" The teams consisted of four people pushing and one person sitting on the seat.


Notice the old man in the center with the cane. He was one of the people riding on the seat. It looks like this guy only moves that quickly once a year, in the outhouse races. He is on his way inside to find his wheelchair.


Here are two of the teams in action.


This is a sock I knitted during the PET conference. I really like knitting. I really like that anything I can draw onto graph paper I can knit onto a sock.


I like this ice art a lot. They are stacked muskox if you can't tell.