Fire + Ice Festival

The Riverwoods outdoors mall is in Provo, Utah. They often host events 3-4 times a year. Around Christmas time they put on “Light the Riverwoods.” This past weekend (February), they hosted the Fire and Ice Festival! This festival is very similar to “Light the Night” but it also has some unique entertainment.

The main focus of Fire and Ice, is to display the ice sculpting competition. Local ice sculptors from all over Utah came and pre decorated around 15 different ice sculptures. Ideally, you would walk in through the main mall entrance across from the AMC theaters and you would immediately see ice sculpture one. As you walk throughout the mall, the ice sculptures are all spaced apart and there are separate Instagram taggings you can include in your post to enter to win a gift card drawing to one of the many businesses at the mall. My favorite ice sculpture was the whale on blue water. The actual ice was blue! There were several other sea creatures as well as woodland creatures to see carved into the ice. At the South entrance, there was an awesome “ICE” sculpture that was completely blue with several intricate carvings on the tops of each letter. At the North entrance, there was a “FIRE” sculpture that was completely red and had a bunny on the top carved into the ice holding a marshmellow stick over the fire.

There was also a smores creation stand. You could donate $1 to create a smore over the fire pits. Fire pits were found all over the mall to help keep you warm and celebrate fire. In the middle of the mall, there were bands and singers playing. But also, Polynesian dancers performed for over an hour! There were barefoot and in their Hawaiian attire outside in the cold! It was super impressive. There were also fire dancers! This was probably the coolest part of the whole evening. There were 4 men dancing and performing with fire and doing tricks. They even had some people try the dances they were doing without the fire. There were hundreds of people at this event, and it got super crowded so definitely bring something to stand on so you don’t miss the show!

There were also several portraits and backdrops to take pictures with. Their was even a mini photo booth where you could hold several different items in your photo to remember the event.

I noticed that besides the fire pits, there were several buckets of ice that reminded me of Snow White and Seven Dwarfs with their carts of diamonds. It looked pretty cool. These were found next to the elephants portraits by Malawi’s Pizza where the elephants were playing with fire and water as depicted in the pictures.

At the very end of the evening, fireworks lit the sky! I am always impressed by the Riverwoods fireworks each time I go. They don’t last too long, but they are loud, bright, and super fast! They launch several at a time so there is much to see.