Jan. 30—ENGLEWOOD — Out the door of an industrial zone in this Denver suburb, snow and ice piles up year-round.
"The landlord hates it," says the man inside, Mike Bickelhaupt.
But just as wood and metal are the scraps of other, neighboring enterprises, the wintry mix is the refuse of this surprise business.
Welcome to Colorado Ice Works, where the surprises continue inside.
Here you find rectangular, steel chambers circulating water in a slow, unspectacular way. The result, following three or four days of mineral filtering and bottom-to-top freezing, is quite the opposite: spectacular, crystal-clear blocks of ice weighing close to 300 pounds.
The blocks are transferred to a room kept below 22 degrees. Here is a machine carving spheres out of those blocks — solid, glassy orbs that you rightly imagine in your cocktail glass. "For a drink that is not watered down, the choice is clear," goes the company line displayed nearby.
And here is the most spectacular part: a sculptor transforming those blocks into something much more with a combination of hand and power tools.
Today's assignment is a 7-foot-tall logo celebrating 60 years of Steamboat Resort. In his time at Colorado Ice Works, for any number of festivals, corporate parties and special occasions, Luke Salley has also created a bucking bronco, a wavy-haired surfer and a glossy Stanley Cup, to name but a few.
The January schedule had Salley working on sculptures for buyers around Denver and across to Alamosa, Glenwood Springs and Telluride. The schedule is posted in the office, where there's a wall-sized map pinpointing bars, restaurants, country clubs and liquor stores ordering that cocktail ice — more than 200 accounts, Bickelhaupt says — and where there's a written goal for the year: $1,568,600 in sales. Bickelhaupt counts on one hand Colorado operations similar in scope and scale to his.
You're not the only one surprised by the business of ice.
"I'm still shocked," Salley says. "Every single day, I can't believe it."
When Bickelhaupt hired Salley in 2021, the artist joined a state industry older than the state itself — one, to be sure, that has vastly morphed. It is today a novelty, propped by the posh
"By people who have arrived," as Salley puts it. "One of the things that says 'I've arrived' is a big, awesome ice sculpture at your event, or craft ice that is the purest ice you can get."
In the beginning, years before Colorado was accepted into the Union, ice was purely practical. Ice was needed before home freezers were widely provided. Men and mules cut and pulled blocks from frozen lakes, ponds and streams that were packed on sawdust and preserved year-round.
Demand was high, as suggested by a Denver harvester's $100 reward posted in The Rocky Mountain News in 1860: "We will pay the above reward for the detection of the person or persons that are in the habit of breaking into our ice house on the bank of the lake above town."
By 1949, reports out of Cañon City suggested Ready Ice Co. was growing into a leading supplier. It was said accounts crossed state lines and rose to the Victorian towers of The Broadmoor.
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Now the hotel looks to a shop in Loveland. That's Struckman Sculpture Ice, started by Ted Struckman in 1988. He doesn't look far to locate the ice industry's modernization.
He looks to Virgil Clinebell, who moved his family to Loveland in 1964. Inspired by the solid, transparent ice he noticed atop lakes of the Rockies, Clinebell went on to develop a machine that mimicked the ways of Mother Nature: In rectangular, steel chambers, water would be circulated as it froze, preventing air bubbles and mineral fog.
"When people saw those crystal-clear blocks, it was just magical," Struckman says. "There wasn't that white core in the center."
Overseen by family still today, Clinebell Equipment Co., by it own account, "has become synonymous with quality the world over." Struckman worked there before making his way to the next front line of the industry.
"When CNC came around, that was a whole new ball game," he says.
Computer numerical control made sculpting more efficient and marketable; lettering and logos could be embedded into the ice. When he started blending the technology, Struckman saw few others in the ice business doing so.
This front line was never where he saw himself.
"I'm from a little town of Nebraska of 420 people. I'd never even heard of an ice sculpture," he says. "I heard a lot about milking cows, in fact I did that. And I guess that's kind of what this business is."
It's hard, methodical work — making it a tough sell for help, never mind its obscurity in the first place.
When prospective workers come to meet the boss at Colorado Ice Works, they come with no knowledge of the niche industry. They leave with an understanding of the physical demands posed by the cold and heavy, loud machinery. However changed the industry from those ice-cutting days on lake shores and creek banks, it requires still a similar grit.
Insurance and liability represented just a couple of financial risks Bickelhaupt took on when he took on Colorado Ice Works in 2013. It was just him at the start, no employees. The sculpting, the delivering, the accounting, the marketing — it all fell on him. He'd go days without seeing his family back home.
"I was petrified honestly," Bickelhaupt says. "Leasing the space, buying all this equipment, I had loans. I was like, How am I gonna do this?"
He questioned his transition from hot kitchens to the Ice Works freezer. Sculpting was a passion, something he did on the side while working as a full-time chef. Sculpting had been on his mind since culinary school, when he watched an instructor carve a swan.
"I had dreams about it," Bickelhaupt says. Dreams about its unexpected pliability and its glimmer with every shifting shape. "Like a jewelry store," he says. "The light bends and reflects and refracts."
He could appreciate it again as stress eased and business picked up with the cocktail ice. While sculpture orders came and went — most of them for winter festivities — the cocktail ice revenue was more consistent.
"When you put that in your cocktail, I don't know what it is. It's just kind of that awe factor," Struckman says. "It's the same thing when I'm watching someone carve."
Free of air bubbles, it's the same thing: The sculptures aren't quick to melt. But they do eventually. Just as the drink only lasts so long, so does the art.
Doesn't that make the artist sad?
"People ask me that all the time, and I say no," Salley says. "You find this zen place of realizing, like, it's kind of like us. We're only here for a single go-around. I make these things, they're here, we get pictures, we talk about them, and then they're gone. So just enjoy them while you can."
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