Start listening to the story of The Ice Castles in Utah at minute 11:13.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I stumbled across a beautiful picture of the Midway Ice Castles on my friend’s Instagram page. Ice shot up behind her in streams, creating a majestic backdrop for her and her family.

The pictures were taken in Midway. This is a city in Utah, 28 miles southeast of Salt Lake City and also fairly close to Provo, which is another big city in Utah.

The finished castle somewhat resembles Elsa’s Ice Palace in the movie Frozen. Of course, not that extravagant, but for real life it’s pretty insane. In the images, you can see the Ice Castle, full of archways, full of tunnels, slides, thrones, fountains, caves, towers and more. It looks like something from a fairy tale. And to make it even more magical, L.E.D. lights of every shade shine throughout it once the sun goes down.

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So how does such a masterpiece come about? Before reading about the creator, Brent Christensen, I was fairly certain that whichever entrepreneur had come up with this idea was trying to capitalize on the popularity of the movie Frozen.

But how wrong could I be? Brent Christensen was simply a dad from California who moved out to Alpine, Utah, and became fascinated by the structures that could be built by freezing running water over wooden structures, rebar, planks and more.

He had actually seen his neighbor reroute some water to create a giant ice hill and thought that was, "pretty cool".

When Brent started, he was not an ice sculpturist and he didn’t quit his day job to take up this new hobby. He actually repaired lawn mowers for a living, but it was seasonal work so he had some free time.He could experiment and from what I read, it sounds like his backyard turned into a sort of lab. He made an ice cave for his daughter, but it wasn’t until he built an ice skating rink and a 20 foot high ice slide in his front yard that all of his neighborhood started talking about it. Eventually, kids from across town heard about what Brent Christensen had built and they put on their warm winter clothes and came over to play.