Smartphone Photography Contest — Sorry, there are no ice palaces at Ice Palace Park

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Behold my entry to the Smartphone Photography Contest hosted by @juliank and @photocontests.

Theme: Parks.

That beautiful masterpiece you see up there ^^ is a photo of Ice Palace Park in Leadville, Colorado.

I graphed this gorgeous photo with none other than iSaac, my trusty iPhone 7.

Ice Palace Park is rather small,

just like most of the parks in Leadville. But that’s okay, this town don’t need no bigass parks, because this town is completely surrounded by national forest and wilderness.

Step outside and point your eyes in any direction, and you can bet there'll be some kind of national forest and/or wilderness jumping around in the background trying to get your attention. I might be exaggerating a tiny bit here, but I’m probably not.

You see that mountain off in the distance? That’s Mt. Massive (14,428 feet), sitting there all smug-like smack-dab in the middle of the extremely appropriately named Mt. Massive Wilderness. If Mt. Massive looks like a bunch of different mountains to you, that’s because Mt. Massive is apparently one mountain with a bunch of different summits. Not sure why they didn't give each summit its own name. I’m guessing those Hayden Survey chaps were just too lazy, or too whiskey-drunk, or maybe both.

Anyway, that should give you a good picture of how close the surrounding forest/wilderness actually is to town.

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Now, if you look closely at my photo,

you’ll notice that there are no ice palaces.

That’s because I took the photo 122 years too late.

Sorry about that.

There was an Ice Palace in Leadville … in the winter of 1895/96.

At the time, the city was experiencing a serious economic slump due to reduced production in the mining district and the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.

So they decided to build a tourist attraction.

36 days, 5,000 tons of ice, and 180,000 board feet of lumber later, and they had their Ice Palace, a winter wonderland of a tourist attraction complete with a skating rink, curling rink, restaurant, ballroom, theater, dance floor, gaming rooms, toboggan runs, and a carousel house.

There were searchlights to brighten up the night. 90-foot-tall ice towers with turrets. And lots of weird stuff frozen inside blocks of ice, like fish, flowers, and lightbulbs.

The Ice Palace drew large crowds before it melted away that March, but in the end it was a financial failure, and Leadville has never ventured to build another one.

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Hello from the high Rockies of Colorado. My name is Brandt, pleased to meet you. I’m a marketing copywriter. I live in a little ghost town called Leadville. If you like mountains, snow, jokes, running, hiking, breathing, not working, etc., then you and I have a lot in common. Thanks for stopping by, and have a lovely day!