Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1184216
It was during the summer, once the picture had been green lit, that I scouted Whistler and found the exact best place to build the town: a sloped parking lot nestled in its own little valley and surrounded by pine trees. Seeing it in the summer brought home how lucky I had been to see it under snow. In the summer it was just an ugly parking lot, with nothing magical about it. The park personnel were extremely helpful and generous. I must have asked them a hundred times to reassure me that the set, once standing, would get snowed on. No snow was the specter that haunted me constantly. Not having snow at the North Pole would have been a complete disaster— but they assured me that it always snowed, every winter, without fail. Very early on, I explored the three different ways to make ice: wetting the existing snow and letting it freeze (everyone at the Park told me that that would never work); installing Freon piping and freezing water (unmanageably complicated and brutally expensive); or using a plastic artificial ice fabricated as a practice surface for hockey players that came in 4 x 8 sheets. This last was the solution chosen in what the vendor said was the largest single installation of the stuff that they had ever heard of. I did preliminary plans based on the parking lot site, and the town eventually evolved into nineteen full buildings surrounding the ice pond. All of the buildings had at least three finished sides and a finished roof, most of them with finished interiors. The existing slope of the lot gave a good start for topographic variety, and I placed the main building, the town hall, at the high end. However, in addition I set a number of buildings at various elevations from the asphalt. The schoolhouse was a full twelve feet above grade, and I designed a segmental bridge that jumped from its sill down into the pond. In addition, the circumferential ice canals were four feet above the level of the ice pond. This required ice ramps down into the pond, which meant tests by the ubiquitous Canadian hockey players on the crew to see what the maximum manageable slopes could be for the ramps. This plan also meant that once the buildings were standing, a massive amount of snow F D E