Ice Palace wowing crowds at Delano winery
DELANO, Minn. – There's a new winter attraction that just opened in Delano. The two-acre Ice Palace is on the site of Fountain Hill Winery.
The Ice Palace originated in Idaho, where it's been a popular attraction for the last five years. The owners thought Minnesota would be a perfect place to expand.
"Minnesota is known for its winters. You guys have so much fun winter activities, we wanted to add the ice palace into that culture here," said Ice Palace CEO Brigham Youngstrom.
Youngstrom ended up connecting with Fountain Hill Winery & Vineyard owner Juston Dooley.
"We definitely discussed, you know, kind of the layout, what it would look like. Personally, I've never even seen an ice palace before," Dooley said.
The secret behind the Ice Palace comes from a patented device that Youngstrom's father invented to make the ice logs.
"We pre-form ice logs, we stand up thousands of these ice logs throughout the ice palace, create an infrastructure of ice, and spray it with water. And Mother Nature takes it from there," said Youngstrom.
It's impressive in daylight, but Youngstrom adds hundreds of LED lights to create incredible effects.
"The ice is constantly glowing and fading out at different magical colors. Especially going through the tunnels at night, like you feel like you're in another world," he said
A world with some pretty sweet acoustics you'll want to test out.
The Ice Palace will be open until the beginning of March. After that, there's a long melting process.
"Beginning of May or mid-May it'll still be melting and yeah, it's quite the ice cube," said Youngstrom.