Snow and tell: New Brighton brothers create giant snow sea lion
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Brothers Austin and Connor Bartz of New Brighton have created an enormous snow sculpture inspired by Sparky the sea lion at the Como Zoo in St. Paul. How enormous? 21 feet tall and 48 feet long.
“And then the tail itself is actually over 16 feet tall as well,” according to Austin.
This is an annual event for the brothers. “We actually started out kind of on a whim,” Austin explained. The idea came from a trip to Florida. Upon returning, the brothers found themselves looking for something to do on a snow day. So they decided to make something out of snow.
“We’re like, hey, we caught a puffer fish off the dock in Florida. Let’s make that out of snow. So we made a puffer fish in our front yard. It took us about eight hours each.”
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Sparky took longer. Austin estimates Sparky took them 1300 hours to make. “The weather this year, as we all know, made it very tough. There was hardly any snow and it was really warm.”
As a result, the brothers had to use artificial snow. “We had a snow machine going. So that’s how we made almost all of the snow for the sculpture. So that was a very time-consuming process.”
Why a sea lion?
“You know what, we like to do a creature that we can put our own twist on and make it a little bit more animated than the actual creature itself,” Austin said. “So we pick a sea creature that has its own fun details.”
Color is also a consideration: “If they’re not in color, because our sculptures are purely snow, and they’re purely white — so there’s a lot of animals that you couldn’t distinguish what it was if it was just white snow.”
For a donation, Sparky will blow smoke out his mouth. “We have a fog machine in the mouth,” Austin said. “So when we push the button and somebody gives $25, Sparky will take a breath.”
This is not the first sculpture to use a fog machine. In 2020, they made a whale. “The whale would blow steam. So that was a big hit. So we figured we got to translate that to this year’s sculpture as well.”
Sea lion? Puffer fish? Whale? You might be sensing a theme. According to Austin, their sculpture is always a sea creature.
“Yeah, we pick a sea creature every year,” Austin explained. “That’s kind of our theme. And we love doing that. Because it’s fun for kids and everybody.”
And there’s another reason: “We do them because it’s very fitting, we’re raising money for clean water. And we start with clean snow. So it kind of all ties together with the sea and the water and the snow. It’s all one big theme.”
This year, the brothers are donating money for clean water in Uganda. The snow sculpture will be on display at the Brightwood Hills Golf Course in New Brighton.
The brothers will maintain the sculpture as long as they can, repairing it as it melts in the unseasonably warm weather. But it won’t be around forever.
“The first few years we did it, we just let it melt,” Austin said. “But then, in the previous couple of years, we usually are open for about a month. And then at some point, we destroy it and call it good.”