From carving steaks to blocks of ice, Coos Bay culinary instructor is a world champion ice sculptor

Chris Foltz has been working as a chef in professional kitchens since he was a teenager, passing on decades of culinary know-how to students at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute in Coos Bay. He can also wield a chainsaw as deftly as a chef’s knife to carve works of art out of 5,000-pound blocks of ice.

As news station KEZI previously reported, Foltz recently won first place in a team event at the 2022 World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks, Alaska, for a 16-foot-tall sculpture of a warrior mounted on an elephant ready for battle. He also brought along students from the ice sculpting course he teaches at the culinary institute, and partnered with one of them to win third place in another competition event. With us now is Chris Foltz, a senior faculty instructor at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute and world champion ice sculptor; and Nick Graham, a student at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute and novice ice sculptor.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller:  Chris Foltz has been working as a chef in professional kitchens since he was a teenager. He is now an instructor at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute in Coos Bay. He has also turned a hobby into another skill to teach his students. Foltz is an ice sculptor. He uses chainsaws and other tools to carve works of art out of enormous blocks of ice. As the news station KEZI recently reported, Foltz won first place in the team event at the 2022 World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks, Alaska. His team’s winning sculpture was 16 ft tall. Foltz joins us now along with one of his culinary and ice sculpting students. Nick Graham took third place with Foltz in a two person carve competition. Congratulations to both of you and welcome to Think Out Loud. How did you start ice sculpting?

Chris Foltz:  I started ice carving as a chef in a casino. I was just basically told to do it one day. The ice carver that was there the day before abruptly wasn’t and I was chosen for the job. So I was sent into the freezer with the chainsaw and an idea and came out about four hours later, covered in snow and slightly traumatized. And it went much better as the time went on.

Miller:  Well how did that first one go? It must have gone well enough that you said,’ I’m gonna do this again’. What did you make?

Foltz:  The first one was just a salmon. That was it. And luckily it was very simple and it was strictly a chainsaw, that was all I used and everybody thought it was cool. But honestly, because I live in a small town, I think if I would have just put the big block out there, everybody would have thought that was great as well. So I can’t take too much credit. But it did turn out looking like a fish I think. And it was good enough that I was asked to keep up with it and keep doing carvings for the casino.

Miller:  So that very first one you did ended up as a centerpiece for a buffet or something?

Foltz:  Absolutely. It was a centerpiece for a banquet that we were doing.

Miller:  Clearly, the stuff you can do now is way more impressive, but I have to say it’s impressive that you’d never done it before. You went into a freezer with a chainsaw and emerged hours later with something that looked like a fish.

Foltz:  You know, it’s funny, I hadn’t really thought about it, but now that you say it, it does sound very, very strange.

Miller:  I mean, I would have emerged with a bunch of ice chips.

Foltz:  Well there were plenty of those too, for sure.

Miller:  How big was that one?

Foltz:  It was just a single block, what we call a Clinebell block. It was about 40″x10″x20″ size block, whittled down. So it wasn’t very big, maybe 3′ across.

Miller:  Nick, what do you remember about your very first carve?

Nick Graham:  My very first carve was actually for our college try-out and it was a star. I watched Chris carve the star. It took him about five minutes. It seems very simple. And then he said, ‘okay, here you go’, handed me a chainsaw and I carved a star. It took me about 30 minutes and it was definitely crooked and curved, but it was good enough to make the team. And that’s all that mattered at the time.

Miller:  That’s some pressure too. I mean, I suppose the buffet is one kind of pressure. It’s a professional thing. But here, if you didn’t get a star that looked good enough, you weren’t gonna be on this team?

Graham:  Right. And I didn’t plan on even trying out. Actually, a few of the other students convinced me, ‘hey, you should try this, you might like it, you never know, just try out for all the teams you can’. And I showed up with no intentions on making it and I did.

Miller:  So what do you remember about carving ice for the first time?

Graham:  I was very intimidated because I had only used a chainsaw maybe once or twice in my dad’s backyard. So using a power tool like that on something that I’ve never even thought of doing was pretty intimidating. But again watching Chris go through the motions and explaining how the process went, made it a little less intimidating. But still it took some time to get used to.

Miller:  So Chris, a swan at say a wedding might be slightly bigger than that 40 inch salmon you did, but it seems like it is a far cry from the stuff you now do at competitions. What’s the scale of competition-sized pieces?

Foltz:  Well, there’s a lot of different scales for competition sized pieces. They range anywhere from a speed competition with a single block which is the same size as the swan or the salmon like we’re talking about. And you would have anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to two hours, depending on that scene. What is very common, when we travel into Canada and in Alaska and around the States, is to have about 15 of those blocks. So now you’re looking at about three or four thousand pounds of ice. And you can reach 10 ft tall, pretty standard. And that’s a pretty good basis for normal U.S. and Canada competition. And then you get into Alaska and a few other remote places where we go to, more or less, what you would call the extreme where we’re cutting blocks out of the lakes and we’re building with 10,000 pound blocks whether it be twelve or ten of those blocks.

Miller:  Ten 10,000-pound blocks of ice?

Foltz:  Yeah. The blocks can range, when you get into that arena, between 5,000 and 10,000 pounds each. Yeah, basically they’re saying if you look at a small car, it’s best. That’s what you’re looking at.

Miller:  But except you’re dealing with ten of those potentially cut out of lakes.

Foltz:  Yeah, cut out of lakes and ponds and things like that. There’s 11 that we’ve done up in Yellowknife right outside of the diamond mine up there at the start of the ice road, where the ice road truckers and all that starts? We have a competition there that’s been going on for a few years. That’s on Great Slave Lake and we’ll cut blocks out of there that are 10′x5 or 6′x4′ ft. So those are some of the biggest blocks, they are upwards of 10,000. The ones in Alaska are about 6x4x3 or 8x5x3 depending. And that’s all by feet of course. So there are about 5,000-6,000 pounds. Huge.

Miller:  How do you go about then making something like a 16-foot tall elephant? Maybe you could start by describing the design of your winning entry?

Foltz:  Sure. Our entry this year was titled Thunderstruck. It was the multi-block for the four-man team. In the design process, basically it’s a lot of like just verbal communication, texting, messaging, and it can be six or eight months before the competition goes, and we’re just throwing ideas out. Then we started kind of nailing down to ‘okay, we know what we want to do. So let’s look at the form’. So we knew it was gonna be a battle elephant. That was what we all decided on. We wanted to do a battle elephant. And so then it was like how is it going to be standing? What’s the form? Are we going to try to do it like rearing up? Is it on all fours? So then you kind of go through that process of artistically or visually seeing what would look cool?

Well then you go into the reality portion of that design where one of us or two of us, that’s usually your senior artists in that arena are starting to decide what we can or can’t do. Because when you’re dealing with over 50,000 pounds of ice at some point, you [determine if] it will hold up. Will it stand? Can we get this extension to hold? What is the temperature looking like this year? How is that going to affect seaming? There’s a real technical part of it. Can we even do it? And how does the design or idea need to be adjusted so that we can complete it without hopefully crashing? You know, you can imagine where that would go. So once we decide on that, then it’s just onto some detail. And then we do what we call the ‘have to’s’ and the ‘want to’s’. So, there’s certain things that have to be done in order to complete the design and if we can complete it with a little bit of extra time, we have the want-to things that will really dress it up and make it pop, you know, make people say ‘wow’.

Miller: Nick, had you ever seen anything like what was happening in this competition that you went to in Fairbanks?

Graham:  No, I had been training with Chris for two years now and this was my first time going to a competition due to COVID and a lot of things were canceled over the past couple of years. So going up there, I had seen some of his sculptures and he had been telling me all the stories and showing me pictures online. But I don’t think it really hit me until I walked up to the side of something standing over me like 16 ft tall. And it really just clicked. Everything that he’d been telling me. So shortly after that competition we had a break and then he and I went into ours.

Miller:  Chris, how do you stick the various pieces together to add something up to be a 16-foot tall battle elephant?

Foltz:  We call it seaming or welding. You can call it either way and there’s multiple techniques to try to make this understandable and quick. Basically this is where some of the science of it comes in. So the simplest idea is stacking, right? So you’re just putting blocks on top of each other. And you actually use what we call a nail board or a super textured with screws through a piece of wood that’s flat to scratch those two pieces of ice where they’re going to connect. And then you put them together using just gravity. Just stack it on top of the other one and inject water into those scratches and lines through it. And basically at that point you bind it through that scratch surface.

Miller:  That’s a flat line in the center and the water just ices the bond tight, correct?

Foltz:  Yeah, It just basically welds tight. That takes a little bit of time to do. It’s only used when it’s cold enough, usually at the warmest, at zero and then you know what I mean, depending on how you’re going but you really want it cold enough to do that. But it’s also the strongest bond that you can get.

Miller:  Zero degrees Fahrenheit. So what was the temperature like or the range when you were in Fairbanks?

Foltz:  We arranged during this week of the multi block, we were averaging about negative 30 F.

Miller:  Is that a comfy temperature for working outside with ice for hours on end?

Foltz:  It’s super. Yeah, that’s a super comfortable temperature. The -20  to -30 is my favorite.

Miller:  I gotta say that my question was meant as a joke. Wait, what makes -30 a comfortable temperature for carving ice?

Foltz:  Well because you know, you don’t have to worry about the ice at all. It’s super strong. It welds very easily. One of your biggest issues that you can run into is water. I mean if something gets wet, if it’s warm at all and when I say warm, I mean like 15°. That’s borderline hot for this type of work because you’re dressed for cold and you’re working really hard. I mean I go up and down scaffolding, you know thirty to forty times a day up and down up and down the scaffolding, you know up 16 ft running a saw running a chisel for a few hours and then, you know, you’re, you’re lugging gear, you’re wearing 40lb. of gear, your boots are rated for -100F, things like that. So when you look at that, the real issue that you can run into is actually getting hot. So for me, the deep -20 to -30F temperature really makes it so it’s super comfortable. You don’t have to worry about getting too hot, the ice is perfect, nothing is getting wet, so it’s really easy to clean.

Miller:  So the Oregon coast in February, I don’t know, you might be used to temperatures in the 40 degrees or so. This could have been 70° colder than that. How did you fare?

Graham:  Yeah, so the day that we left to go, I believe it was 40 or 50 degrees. And when we got off the plane it was -30 and I was wearing a sweatshirt and this is the first time I’ve ever been in negative degree weather. At first you didn’t notice it until you stood out there for maybe five minutes and then it started to get, you know, a little cold. This was definitely an interesting trip for me to understand what he was just saying about wearing the proper amount of layers and I also overheat very easily. So it seemed crazy, but I would just go out there wearing a t- shirt and a sweatshirt and a hat, snow pants and boots. And I was good to go. I don’t know, it’s just like you said. It’s really important, making sure that you’re keeping yourself cool enough and not overheating because as soon as you sweat, you’re miserable.

Miller: Nick, what do you hope to do with your ice sculpting skills in the future in terms of your career? And as I noted at the beginning, the way the two of you met is that you were a student at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute, right?

Graham:  So I am intending on hopefully continuing to compete up in Alaska. That’s the goal  and working on acquiring my own tools and continuing training with Chris throughout the rest of the school year. Further past that, hopefully competing in Alaska, and then if I can get into a catering business of myself, doing those small little swans and things like that. It’s difficult if you’ve never done it. But now, after doing this Alaska trip, it seems like it’s nothing carving through a little block like that. So it would be easy. Now. It definitely was not easy if you would have asked me that a year ago.

Miller:  Chris, you’ve been in the culinary world for decades now. What is the business case these days - how much demand is there catering wise for ice sculptures?

Foltz:  Well that’s a great question and you know, we live in a small town here. So I’m probably a little bit taken out of the big city ideas. But you know, ice carving kind of goes up and down a little bit with popularity. And I gotta tell you, maybe five years ago it was actually dipping a little bit. But this last year or two, specifically this last year after the COVID situation has started to relax a little bit and people are getting out, more events are starting to kick up. The F and B [food and beverage] industry is rebounding.

We’ve had a lot more business this year than in the past five years and some of my friends in Houston and New York - we  stay in touch a lot, we compete together, but we go home to our own places. A lot of my friends in those big cities are saying they’re busier than they’ve ever been. So it’s great to see it really picking up and becoming, you know, even not to say what it once was, you know, but in its new form, you know, people are getting out and they want to start doing this again, getting these big events to go.

Miller:  Nick, Chris has already cornered the market on battle elephants. But if you’re dreaming big, what would you want to make when you’re at his level?

Graham:  You know, I’m not sure. I think as a solo sculptor, I’d do animals and realism. I’m not nearly as creative as Chris is when it comes to abstract things, but I’m getting better. And I mean, I would hope to even be half as good as what he’s at now. But I think realism would definitely be what I’m targeting.

Nick Graham and Chris Foltz. Thanks very much.

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