ICEHOTEL BLOG DAY 14 - Icehotel is a ‘whole body’ experience at every level. When I open my eyes in the morning I am in a warm comfortable bed. When I swing my feet to the floor and switch off the ‘revving motorcycle’ alarm I know that there’s a long day ahead. After the normal round of ‘getting up’ stuff, things then change from the norm. I allow 30 minutes from eyes open until the breakfast meeting. A third of this is suiting up: first a base layer, then socks and a middle layer that depends on the ambient temperature. So far all’s okay to wear at room temperature. The main event is donning the boots, the down-filled bib pants, and the red Canada Goose Resolute parka (now my ‘signature’ garment). But this doesn’t go on until I have everything to hand. Wearing this lot at plus 20ºC in a room becomes yucky very quickly. I have many pockets in my parka so I try to organise stuff in a standard way. Then I take up my hard-hat and the bag containing the four different types of gloves I’ll need: general gloves for warm hands, thin inner gloves for precise work and marking up, heavy work gloves for lifting ice, chainsawing, moving ladders, etc., and finally the ‘fur’ lined rubber gloves for handling water, slush and snice. I always take the gloves back to my cabin to dry them out. If left in the suite overnight they freeze solid and are hard to put on, especially the rubber gloves (a protracted process that can involve heating them under one’s armpits). Damp gloves left on a block of ice can make a string bond. Stepping outside, the air is cold, clean and crisp. One’s nose hairs become stiff as the cold air freezes any moisture on them. It’s a slightly weird sensation that wears off. It is getting noticeably darker every morning as the hours of sunlight reduce daily. The snow underfoot is cold and powdery. It makes a squeaking sound that you almost never hear in the UK. I take a short cut through the trees, and after a couple of minutes walk I arrive at the restaurant entrance. There’s a brush to remove loose snow from one’s clothing. Not to do so when entering a heated building means sitting in damp clothes, which is an unnecessarily unpleasant sensation. Staying comfortable throughout the day helps one work better, for longer. I negotiate wooden spiral stairs down to the restaurant basement carefully, they weren’t designed with Arctic boots in mind, where one has and extra inch of boot all round. The parka is hung up and a coffee grabbed. I also a have a couple of glasses of lingonberry juice (rather like cranberry juice). It is thirsty work and one has to stay hydrated. The downstairs area is a haven of warmth and companionship. Here is where lunch and dinner are taken, at unusually early hours by standards elsewhere, lunch at 1130 and dinner at 1630. One burns a lot of calories when doing hard physical work in sub-zero temperatures - I’m eating more, but weighing less, it’s the ice-artist’s diet. It’s back into the cold for the walk to the ICEHOTEL site, it was -20ºC today, but felt colder due to the wind off the river. As you get close to the build site the snow cannons can also add a fine mist in to the air, which chills one’s face. How it feels working inside the ever growing ICEHOTEL rather depends on the task in hand. The warmest it gets inside is –5ºC. Although commissioned as an artist, one must also be the main fabricator of the design, so one participates in every activity. It’s important that Magdalena and I are ‘connected’ with the build materials and shape the art ourselves. Generally speaking the heavy work reduces as you go along, and the finer, more artistic work takes over. Every suite requires ice, so this needs to be moved around and lifted. Everyone has their lift limit, and ice is heavy and slippery. Heavier blocks can be slid on super slippery flat sleds. Moving and positioning ice is a task performed daily. Bonding ice blocks together requires water and/or slush, so on go the rubber gloves for scooping and pouring. Leather gloves soon become wet and hands very cold if they’re used for this. If there’s a lot of slushing to do, such as bonding the roof blocks of the tube train, then one’s hands can get numb (bad news), so it’s good to plan a session of this before a break so one can warm up. Slush can also get on your outer clothes, where it freezes hard making garments as stiff as a board. When working inside the hotel there’s no daylight, so one is largely unaware of the time of day, unless you have to go outside to fetch ice, snow or water (which one often does). When collecting water a ‘little and often’ approach is adopted as standing water soon freezes. There’s a 100m walk to a lone tap on the side of the warm building. It often requires a dull blow to get it going. Fetching snow requires a wheelbarrow and wide snow shovel. One learns where to find the best snow for the job in hand; the snow cannons provide masses of snow, but within the huge piles there’s often a best spot to be found, clean, lump and ice free, but ideally slightly moist. Finding the ‘right’ snow is a bizarre skill that’s of very little use elsewhere. I now feel I can find reasonably good stuff even in the dark. This is all basic building work, but with a unique twist in that everything is water in one form or another. Bizarrely this year, Swedish officials have demanded that ICHOTEL have a fire alarm fitted in each room, an interesting requirement of an hotel made entirely from water! Almost every task has physicality to it, so one must pace oneself, eat sensibly, hydrate, and get neither too cold, nor too warm. Pacing oneself is also important safety-wise, tiredness or undue haste can lead to accidents, and it is a hazardous environment with slippery materials in abundance, plus sharp tools such as chainsaws and ice chisels. It takes a few days to get into the rhythm of ICEHOTEL work, but then one’s in the groove and just hits the ground running every day. When possible I try to avoid doing very repetitive work that taxes just one set of muscles. At the end of the day one is usually pretty exhausted, but during the slow walk back to the cabin one can hopefully reflect on a good day’s effort and solid progress. The joy of a warm shower, writing the daily blog, and then sleep is sometimes delayed if there’s a display of Northern Lights. One has to stop and take in their magnificence. Last night I added 45 minutes to my day to photograph a huge display directly over ICEHOTEL. The green and red hues of the aurora juxtaposed with the orange lights on the snow-cannons. I sleep deeply and well, and wake the next day with a new ache that must be worked off. Tomorrow: ‘Heavy metal.’
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 19:10:13 +0000