A palace made of ice and lights.   

“It’s pretty cool,” exclaims Afton Graunke from Buffalo. “I like the lights and stuff, and the icicles are, yeah, it’s very magical.”

But this isn’t the North Pole.

It’s Delano, Minnesota.  

“That’s just crazy how they can do this,” declares Emily Bisek from New Prague. “Especially in Minnesota, you never know what the winter is going to be.”

For the third year, the Ice Palace has returned to Delano — this year, in the city’s Central Park.

A frozen winter wonderland, getting a big welcome.

“I go to college outside of Minnesota,” says Lindsay Bisek, Emily’s big sister. “So last year, I didn’t get to experience any part of winter, so it’s been super cool to finally have cold weather and experience things like this.”

The palace is the creation of the Youngstrom family from Idaho.

They are third-generation home builders who picked Minnesota for its cold winters.

Working here with ice instead of wood.

“Our family, we’re log home builders, so it just seems to make sense to call it ice logs,” explains Kira Martin, the Ice Palace CEO. “That’s what we use for our infrastructure.”

The family uses a special device to form ice into cylinders up to eight feet long.

They supplement that with chopped-up lake ice.

“We came up with that patented method to form elongated piece of ice about eight inches in diameter,” Britton Youngstrom, the Ice Palace director of operations, says. “We have over 70 sprinklers that spray and let Mother Nature do the rest.”

Family members and staff make thousands of ice logs.

High above, sprinklers spray water downward, forming icicles everywhere and now, the cold snap hitting Minnesota brings a collective sigh of relief.

Last season’s warm weather allowed the palace to stay open only four days.

That’s because to make the ice cylinders and keep them intact, temperatures must be at 25 degrees or below.

It was a half-million-dollar loss for the Youngstroms, who later were forced to sell the original family home.

“It was a lot of stress and heartache, just putting your heart and soul into something and thinking it’s going to work, it’s going to work,” Martin recalls.

But now, so far, so good.

There are 90,000 square feet of tunnels, slides and rooms for ice palace fans to enjoy.

Tickets cost around $20 for adults, depending on what day you go, and about half that for kids.

The attraction is to stay open, weather permitting, until the end of February. “It was really, really cool,” smiles Alcuin Graunke from Buffalo. “Like the formations of the ice, I can’t explain it; it’s so awesome.”