Greg Beachey

You can absolutely work your way into ice carving. It is all about just having a vision, and then a lot of practice. It’s just getting after it and doing it over and over and over.

I’ve been carving ice part-time for more than 20 years. There was a festival in South Haven that’s been going for years. A bunch of chefs that I used to work within southwest Michigan went up there and I went with some of them. They handed me a chainsaw and told me to start carving. It was just a basket in front of a bakery. It wasn’t bad. But it got me hooked.

We’d been doing the festivals around southwest Michigan and a couple of them in northern Indiana and decided Goshen needed an ice festival. So I went to the Chamber of Commerce, and it was just the year that First Fridays started. So I started talking to First Fridays folks and we got it rolling. It’s been huge ever since.

It’s a loose association. It’s the Michiana Ice Carvers, but we’re basically just a bunch of folks who get together to carve ice. It’s not like an official organization. We call ourselves Michiana Ice Carvers just to call ourselves something.

There’s an amazing piece that we work on or something that’s really cool almost every year that we’ve done it. We made the ice bars a couple of years. Last year we did the Game of Thrones throne. Every year we do something fun.

There’s something new happening. There are new businesses starting. There’s just a feeling that there’s something going on in Goshen that you want to be a part of.