Ice carving is art, pure and simple.

And that’s why so many are so enamored with the long-running, popular Cripple Creek Ice Festival.

This year’s event will offer even more opportunities for the public to partake, as the festival will run almost every day from Saturday through Feb. 23, minus Tuesday, when the town will receive a giant shipment of ice. Past festivals have only run Saturday through Monday and the following Saturday and Sunday, but this year people can watch carvers make magic out of frozen water and check out more than 40 vendors for eight days.

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“It’s a completely different art medium people think is really cool,” said Tracie Bennitt, marketing and events director for the city of Cripple Creek.

“Carvers are welding and gluing together blocks of ice. There’s a special art in gluing the blocks together. They’re using chainsaws, Dremels, grinders, any hand-held tools you’d use on wood you can use on ice.”

Bennitt is the beautiful mind that conjured the festival into existence 25 years ago. After a friend in Victor, whose son is an ice carver in Fairbanks, Ala., expressed interest in having a carver come in, Bennitt turned that wish into reality. She invited 11 Alaskan ice carvers to that first year of the festival, where they competed against each other for fun, not money.

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“There were a lot of people in town,” Bennitt said. “It was a pretty big deal. There are a lot more now because it’s a much larger event. It’s iconic and people are just enthralled by what they can make out of these chunks of ice.”

Nowadays, seven teams of four from around the state are invited to compete for cash: $1,000 in head-to-head carving challenges held three times on each Saturday of the festival, and a $5,000 prize for the overall winning team. There’s no theme carvers must abide by, just an edict to go forth and create.

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Cripple Creek’s event differs from the International Snow Sculpture Championships held in Breckenridge in January — those carvers work with big blocks of snow. In Cripple Creek, carvers go through two shipments of 41,000 pounds of ice.

In addition to the teams, a carver from France, who works for Cripple Creek Ice Castles, will forge a castle in town during the festival. The Ice Castles are open through March 10.

“This is a family event,” Bennitt said. “There are some interactive ice carvings people can pose with and take pictures. And there are plenty of museums to check out while you’re here.”