When I got cold during competition one afternoon, I ducked inside an igloo built in two hours by two men who developed ''the Icebox,'' a lightweight, portable tool to help pack snow into uniform blocks for building shelters. It was 42 degrees inside the igloo, 18 degrees outside in the falling snow.

About 2,000 visitors attend the festival each year; and 200 to 300 visit the park on any given winter weekend. This year there were competitors from Spain, Japan, England, Ukraine and all over Canada and the United States.

Hundreds of people cheered when Evgeny ''Jack'' Kryvosheytsev, 37, of Ukraine finished in the finals -- the only climber to complete the course.

It was not that way when a few residents of Ouray -- best known for its hot mineral springs -- first started ''farming'' ice 15 years ago.

''People used to say you could lie down in the middle of Main Street and take a nap in winter and not get run over,'' says Bill Whitt, who moved to Ouray primarily to climb and bought the Victorian Inn with a friend, Gary Wild, in 1991.

''In January of '91 we had two hotels in town, and if either rented out a room in the middle of the week, we were real excited about it,'' Whitt says. ``We started offering continental breakfast because nobody was open for breakfast in the winter.''

The area was already known as a natural paradise for rock and ice climbers, but there weren't very many of them.

A PROFITABLE LEAK

''We thought it would be a good idea to attract more climbers and other winter visitors, and water was already leaking from an old reservoir just above the gorge,'' Whitt recalls.

That first year, he and Wild used shovels to redirect some of the leaks and create five new routes. The next year, they convinced the owner of the hydroelectric plant to let them weld spigots to his pipes and add hoses and sprinkler heads to create more ice flows.

''A lot of times the hoses would all freeze up, and we would have to disconnect them and throw them in the hot tubs down here at the hotel to unfreeze them,'' Whitt recalls. ``That spawned a whole new idea: We decided to put in hard plastic pipes that we could cut off to keep the water from freezing up and make an ice park in the gorge. Now there are thousands of feet of hose and tons of hard plastic pipe and valves.''

The first ice festival was in January 1996. Now, the park usually opens to climbers in mid-December.

''We know if we start climbing on it too soon, a lot of big, interesting features get knocked off or never grow to their potential, so we wait until the ice is ready. By sometime in January, it's about as big as it's going to get for the year because of all the climbers and then the gradual warming. We can barely keep up with the melting, but we usually have good ice into early April,'' says Whitt, chairman of the ice park's board of directors.

'A lot of ice was already here, but we started `farming' a lot more to make it thicker, safer, harder so it is more controlled,'' says Lora Slawitschka, assistant director of the festival. ``Especially in dry years, we kinda help it along, but it's still natural ice.''

You can also climb in the many canyons around Ouray, hike, cross-country ski, ice skate or soak in the hot mineral water, or stay in Ouray and get a lift ticket to ski in Telluride, an hour away.

Some shop owners still close for the winter, because summer is busy with four-wheeling, jeep touring, hiking, fishing, rock climbing, camping, fantastic scenery and cool, clean mountain air. But the locals agree that the ice park has turned Ouray's economy around.

''Before the ice park opened, the whole town emptied out in winter,'' Eddy said. ``When the last leaves were falling, the last stores were closing and people were moving out. We figure the park adds $4 million to the economy each year.''

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