The Frozen Wonder of America's Biggest Ice Castle

Depending on how old you are, you'll either stand in front of the Ice Castle in North Woodstock, New Hampshire and think that you're walking into Superman's Fortress of Solitude, or that you've been transported to Arendelle, and you're about to enter Elsa's Ice Palace. Whether or not you think you're in Frozen, parts of you will feel frozen soon enough. Even on a mild winter day, even with your warmest snow gear, the Ice Castle is very cold.

But if you can bundle yourself up and spend some time in the Ice Castle, you'll find a living sculpture to winter unlike anything else in New England - or many other places in the country, for that matter. There are five other castles in North America (in Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Utah and Alberta, Canada), but the New Hampshire castle is the biggest of them all, weighing in at a staggering 20 tons of ice. Over the course of this year's 10 week season, the attraction will welcome about 160,000 visitors.

Inside, you won't find any Disney characters singing about how the cold never bothered them anyway - unless you visit on a Saturday afternoon, when there are actually princess meet and greets. What you will find is thousands upon thousands of icicles, grown on the "icicle farm" in the back of the property, that the castle's architects use to build the coves, corridors and archways of the frozen structure.

The process goes like this: Once the icicles are large enough, they're added to the castle structure each day. When they're positioned properly, they're then coated with water from an enormous sprayer to freeze them into place. Because the castle changes from sun and rain, and because the "ice artisans" add more ice daily, the castle changes from one day to the next, and no two visits are the same.