An All-Female Snow-Sculpting Team Is Carving Out a Niche

The Chickadees are chiseling away at a male-dominated craft.

The Chickadees, Maine's all female snow-sculpting team with their practice snow-sculpture of Artemis in Waterville Maine
By Bridget M. Burns
Photos by Tara Rice
From our February 2025 issue

On a bitterly cold, bluebird afternoon last winter, a trio of women in matching blaze-orange parkas gathered at Quarry Road Trails, in Waterville, to will a Greek goddess from a hunk of snow. They’d started the day before with a four-by-six-foot block of packed snow emptied from a refrigerator box. With razor-blade wallpaper scrapers, they chiseled from the frozen form a crude bust of Artemis, with a bowl-shaped moon on her shoulder. On this day, they were fussing over the huntress, etching gathers on her dress and grooves on her prodigious updo with chisels and a metal curry comb and smoothing her garment and features with sandpaper and a handleless paintbrush.

Sisters Serena and Phoebe Sanborn, along with Desiree Dubois, were practicing for the U.S. National Snow Sculpting Championship in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where they planned to render a nine-foot-tall kneeling Artemis with a bow and arrow pointed at the moon. The group, known as The Chickadees, would count for three of only six women in the competition and would be the only all-female team. They chose to sculpt the lunar goddess as a symbol of female strength and an homage to a planned NASA mission of the same name that would send the first woman around the moon. “The physical challenge appeals to a lot of men,” Serena said. “It’s important for girls to see women in spaces like this, so they can feel like they can do anything.”

A friend from Alaska taught Serena snow sculpting in 2013, and she began competing immediately. In 2019, she placed second in the U.S. National event with another team. “I love the challenge of collaborative problem-solving,” she said. “One brain is fine, but many brains can solve things so much easier.” Serena and Phoebe, who work for the arts organization Waterville Creates, started sculpting together in 2017; a couple years later, they invited their friend, Dubois, an artist, to join them. During last year’s snowless early winter, The Chickadees met weekly to sketch their Artemis sculpture and practice carving it from blocks of clay. They had only one opportunity to sculpt with snow before the national competition in February.

Over the course of the normally frigid four-day contest, participants typically spend about eight hours a day sculpting an ten-by-ten-foot block of packed snow provided by the organizers, and work through the night before the final day. But during last year’s event, daytime temperatures in Lake Geneva hovered in the high 30s and 40s. “The first thing we noticed as the plane was landing was a landscape of brown, not white,” Phoebe said. Organizers delayed the start of the competition by a day and encouraged contestants to carve at night to avoid excessive melting. “The snow behaved like the stuff that fills a snow cone,” said Dubois. “That doesn’t make for smooth, crisp lines, or great shadows. It was a huge challenge.”

On the final day, a sculpture of a human puppet collapsed minutes after judging concluded, while the dripping tusks of a mammoth falling through ice, meant as a statement on climate change, seemed apt. Artemis remained intact but didn’t earn a prize. “It was pretty amazing to go there, having only sculpted together for a couple years, and work next to teams that had been sculpting 15, 20 years together,” Serena said.

The Chickadees are currently working on a sculpture of a cottage on chicken legs (home to the child-eating Baba Yaga ogress in Slavic folklore), which they plan to debut at a New Hampshire competition this winter. “Everyone has their thing that is about the inner challenge, proving to yourself that you can do it,” Phoebe said. “Snow sculpting gives us such a feeling of accomplishment, and it ends in public art.”

See The Chickadees’ latest sculpture at the New Hampshire Sanctioned & Jackson Invitational Snow Sculpting Competition. Jan. 31–Feb. 2, 2025. Great Glen Trails Outdoor Center, 1 Mount Washington Auto Rd., Gorham, New Hampshire.

Down East magazine, February 2025

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.