By Nancy Riedell
The Fire and Ice Festival held in Ely, Nevada is an event that began in 2003 and has been a long-standing winter tradition in White Pine County. Regardless of weather, everyone is invited to get out and join the community in fun, festivities, and fireworks every third weekend in January during the Martin Luther King (MLK) holiday. Fire and Ice started out as an arts festival with its annual Ice Sculpting competition.
Team Cobb, Patti and Steve Cobb, and Kathy Cobb won first place with their snowflake sculpture.
The Fire and Ice Festival is typically held at Cave Lake. But due to dam building over the last five years, it has been held at various locations in Ely. Building the dam is nearing completion and Nicole Collard hopes that once again, the Fire and Ice Festival will be held there in January 2026.
This year, however, due to lack of snow, instead of building ice sculptures, four teams created snowflakes built from wooden pallets and supplies given to them from the White Pine Tour and Recreation Department.
Team Williams received an Honorable Mention with their snowflake.
The teams were willing to battle the icy cold winds to build their snowflakes. And even though there was no snow this year, they still needed to have warm gear and hot chocolate with them in order to incentivize them to complete the building of their snowflakes.
Each team had to break apart pallets and use the items given to them. The items included three pallets, a kit of various shapes (such as rectangles, circles, etc.), a string of lights, and paint. The teams needed to maintain the theme of “fire and ice.”
The teams began building their snowflakes at 10:00 AM on Sunday, Jan. 19th and completed them at 2:00 PM. The event was held at Broadbent Park this year.
The event coordinators were Nicole Collard, Sales and Events Manager from the White Pine Tourism and Recreation and Errol Porter, Marketing Manager also from White Pine County Tourism and Recreation. The judges were Mary Valencia, a Board Member of White Pine Tourism and Recreation and Wayne Cameron, a retired head of the White Pine Chamber of Commerce.
Each snowflake was then judged, and the winners were determined.
The judges awarded prizes to the winners:
1st Place = $1,000
2nd Place = $500
3rd Place = $250
As there were four teams, Fourth Place was awarded as an Honorable Mention.
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