Scott Rella didn’t really know what he was doing when he started carving elaborate, sparkling sculptures out of ice more than four decades ago. He only got the gig because another chef at his day job in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria (where he worked while attending art school at night) asked him if he’d like to give it a shot. 

“This wasn’t even my idea,” Rella says. But “I just fell in love with it.”

So, wearing a lofty toque, checkered pants, and a pristine white coat, he began wielding a chainsaw and hand tools at the Rockefeller Center and other venues. Rella founded Ice Sculpture Designs in 1981, sold that New York–based business in the mid-’90s, and hightailed it to the Rockies for the outdoorsy lifestyle. 

After relocating to the Vail area in 1996 he opened Aspen Vail Ice with a focus on local clients. A year later, he launched Fear No Ice, a marketing firm specializing in live ice carving performances set to music (including one in which a couple of chainsaw-wielding sculptors transform a six-foot-high wall of ice into a brand logo).

Between corporate gigs (Disney, Nike) and television appearances (Regis & Kathie Lee, Letterman), Rella represented the United States at World Ice Art Championships and then at the Winter Games in Lillehammer in 1994 (where ice carving was featured as a cultural event). At home in Avon, he also sculpts with clay and marble, paints, and plays music too. “I’m just an artist,” he says. “That’s just how my brain works.” 

But his preferred medium is frozen water. 

“I think there’s something magical about the ice,” says Rella, whose commissions at Aspen Vail Ice include towering statues for vacation homeowners during the holidays; elaborate ice lounges, ice luges (from ice block funnels with corkscrewing tunnels for drink service to functional slides for playtime), and graffiti ice walls (that can be etched and initialed by guests wielding rotary hand tools) for parties; and dramatic entranceways, cake stands, and centerpieces for weddings. One popular wedding and special events venue lately is Dunbar Ranch in Aspen, owned by Yellowstone star Kevin Costner.  

Because it’s chilly where ice art happens (a massive walk-in freezer), Rella wears a knit hat and winter jacket—pretty much the year-round standard uniform for professional ice sculptors—when carving away in a new 3,000-square-foot studio in Gypsum. Lately, Bryan Park, who bought a half-stake in the business two years ago, has been running the show, as Rella prepares to “tiptoe” away into the aurora-borealis shimmering arctic sunset. “I love Bryan,” Rella says. “He’s like an angel sent to me, I swear to God.” 

The competition 

Back in the day, most ice sculptors came from the culinary world, says Paul Wertin, who recently moved Alpine Ice from a converted garage in Wolcott to an 1,800-square-foot studio in Eagle with fellow sculptor Jake Proffit. 

“Now, I think there’s much more of a shift toward people who studied art in school, because it is something that you can make a living at,” says Wertin, who earned a fine arts degree from Westmont College in 1993 and two years later moved to Vail, where he taught snowboarding, rock climbing, and art. In 2005, he sculpted ice with Rella, and ventured out on his own four years later.

At Alpine Ice, Wertin and Proffit specialize in functional ice art: Think three-tiered seafood towers, pagodas with windows that hold “a single serving of sushi on a little platter,” or the head of a horse equipped with a tube, through which you just might pour an elegant cocktail. “We do a lot of functional ice that’s interactive too,” Wertin says. 

And like Rella, Wertin feels confident about handing over his business to the next generation when the time comes. “I won the lottery when I found Jake,” he says. “He’s an incredibly good worker, good artist, and just a good human being.”

Tools, process, and people

Wertin and Proffit make their ice blocks with patented machines (one is called a Clinebell, the other an Ice Box) that circulate water by a pump as it freezes, forcing air bubbles to the top, ensuring that the blocks remain as clear as glass (not frosty white), and “so pure, it’s like cutting butter,” Proffit says.

These temporary artworks that glisten like crystal are no longer just the centerpiece of festive buffets but actually become part of the service itself: Both Alpine Ice and Aspen Vail Ice use a tool called a CNC machine (it stands for “computer numeric control”) that allows them to carve letters, logos, and other ideas with precision and assemble the blocks to form larger pieces. Then the hand tools come out, which, says Wertin, “is where it all comes to life.” And life is so much of what these sculptors create as well, from a full-scale Acura NSX (which Rella helped create from a hundred 300-pound blocks for the Sundance Film Festival in 2017) to a 70-foot-long, 7-foot-tall undulating wall on the banks of Gore Creek modeled after Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence (which Wertin created for the 2014 edition of Winterfest, the Town of Vail’s annual ice art installation). 

“I get excited about more abstract art that we can do with ice, when we get to do something just completely out of the box, art for art’s sake,” Wertin says. 

Hence, the appeal of Vail’s Winterfest, which Alpine Ice has produced for Vail’s Art in Public Places program for the last 15 years. There, working with thousands of pounds of ice, Proffit says there’s excitement in the size, scale, and “creative freedom” of the project. He likes to immerse himself in whatever world he’s creating. For last year’s Winterfest, which Proffit deems his “utmost favorite” (theme: Night Owls), Alpine Ice created six larger-than-life illuminated nocturnal birds. This year, he’s possibly even more excited because the theme revolves around gnomes.