Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Dueling Chainshaws!

So as Ashley said last week, it was a big week for us. We got pre-qualified for our house, and its officially less than three months 'til we get married. When I think about it I really can't even believe how fast the time has gone since we got engaged. You always have people tell you how fast the time goes by when you are engaged, but I don't think you really grasp it until you are in it.
Saturday, we went up to Midway in the afternoon to go to Wasatch County's Winterfest. It was held up at the Zermatt Resort. The main reason that we went was to see Dueling Chainsaws! Its a timed ice carving competition with, you guessed it, chainsaws.
We also decided to take the opportunity to have Ashley's dad take some pictures of us. Ashley is scrapbooking a book for us to have signed at our wedding. I was actually surprised that, given the freezing temperatures that we took the picture in, they actually turned out really well. We got quite a few pictures that we both really liked, even one where Ashley is pushing me into a muddy lake.
When we got done with pictures we decided to go and take a look at the ice sculptures that had already been carved. There was one guy that had carved a life-sized Harley Davidson. After seeing these it got me really excited to see the finals for the competition.
Those were held at Soldier's Hollow, a ski resort about five minutes from the Zermatt. We were sitting on cold metal bleachers and the sun had already gone behind the mountains. But I have to say as soon as they fired up the chainsaws, turned on a little AC/DC, I forgot all about the cold.
These guys were awesome. There was one in particular, Reinboltz, that really played to the crowd. He would run out and high five the people on the front row, he would do little antics with other carvers and generally just be crazy.
I really liked seeing how fast they were able to go and how much detail they could get using something as large as a chainsaw. One of the sculptures was a dragon, complete with flames coming out of his mouth, and scales all over his body. The other sculptures were a cocopelli, a phoenix and an elk.
At the end of the show, they killed the lights and had a killer fireworks show. It was pretty impressive considering the show was free and it was one of the few times that you will see fireworks in the middle of the winter. It just doesn't happen that often.

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