Eric Whitney stood before a roughly 25-foot-tall wooden statue on the ice of the Kuskowkwim River.
“Well, since I get to make them, I can make them however I want, so I make them funner,” Whitney explained, fastening a steady rope around the base of the structure. “Because you’re gonna put something up, it just seems like you could put a little more effort into it. And it’s fun to have an art project to do.”
Whitney has been building the Ice Classic tripods for about a decade and spares no time in making them “funner.” Last year, Whitney constructed a giant bunny, the year before, a blooming flower. This spring, the tripod takes the shape of Whitney’s three-legged dog, Charlie.
“He is a super happy dog, so he was kind of an inspiration,” Whitney described. “And I mean, if your name is Tripod Charlie, you should just have a tripod.”
The tripod is a work of art, but it also serves a utilitarian purpose – when the ice breaks and the tripod falls, it’ll stop the clock and mark the official breakup time of the Kuskokwim River at Bethel. To be able to fall, though, the tripod first has to rise.
Over the course of an afternoon on the still-frozen Kuskokwim, Whitney augered three holes in the ice to hold the base of the tripod. Then a team of five people help lifted the beams, and Tripod Charlie began to take his stance.
It’s the way any great statue – take Michelangelo’s David or the Statue of Liberty – might've been erected. It had its moments of doubt and head scratching, which eventually led to problem solving with interludes of stepping back, cocking your head to the side, and saying "hmm."
“Oh, you know, it's always a little rough, translating the concept to the actual practice and making sure everything fits together well,” said assistant Joseph Elhardt.
Elhardt helped Whitney make this year’s tripod over the past few days, using scrap wood and lumber to saw, drill, and paint the statue that’s about four people tall. On April 5, on the ice, with the help of some community members, the pieces finally came together. And it was all for a good cause, according to Kuskokwim Ice Classic manager Haley Hanson.
“The Ice Classic is an event that is used to raise money for nonprofits in our community, where we have a tripod on the ice that's connected to a clock in the shack on shore,” Hanson explained. “And so when the ice goes out and the tripod travels a certain length of yardage down the river, it trips the clock, and whoever's the closest in their guesses wins money.”
Hanson said it's common for people to take drives after work to look out at the tripod, inspecting the thaw, sizing up the status of their luck. People place bets from all over the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and call the Ice Classic phone line often to ask for ice updates.
But nearly as big of a prize — which in years past can be a jackpot of more than $20,000 — is its community signaling of spring.
The people that live along the Kuskokwim are always watching the river.
It’s a thoroughfare that becomes a road, a boatable waterway, a source of food depending on the time of year, connecting the otherwise isolated communities of the region. And this time of year, when the ice becomes too thin to drive, it’s a slow waiting game for river breakup.
“It’s a signal of spring and summer to come. And that makes it extra exciting, because it's like, 'alright, you guys, we're in the home stretch.' January, February, those are some rough months. But once we hit March and April, it's like ice classic season, we're on our way,” Hanson said.
Hanson said what keeps the game interesting is how variable breakup can be. In Ice Classics past, the tripod has gone out in mid-April. Other years, May. Rather unfathomably, people have guessed it down to the minute it will float away based on just a gut feeling.
“With [the] ice classic [it's] like, I don't know what kind of spring it's gonna be. Let's just roll the dice [and] find out,” Hanson said. “I wish we had something that was a little easier, but that might make it not as fun.”
As Eric Whitney said, it’s worth all this, making it “funner.” But he also puts hours of work into an art project that’s doomed to be totally destroyed by the river.
“Sometimes the ice just takes it on down and wipes it out,” Whitney said. “And then other years, it just moves it a few 100 yards and it's sitting there. You can, you might be able to go rescue it, but I don't count on rescuing him.”
Whitney said sometimes he’s able to kayak out through the churning ice water and save pieces of the tripod if the conditions are safe enough. But they often aren’t.
So the ice classic statue — Tripod Charlie — it’s kind of like decorating an ornate sandcastle close to the shoreline or sinking days into carving the perfect pumpkin — it can’t last forever.
“It's gonna fall over, probably get ground up, washed down the river, maybe end up in the ocean, maybe sit on the bank somewhere abandoned, who knows,” Elhardt described. “But I think there's something beautiful to that, in like we have these few days where we're making the art and building this thing, and … once it's done, it's gone. And I think that's kind of how life is. Often, you have things that you build, things that you do. They last, who knows how long? [You] can't really predict. If you do, you win a lot of money. And then, they're carried up downstream. And what can you really do?”
Tickets for the 2025 Ice Classic are now on sale at iceclassic.org. For $5 a guess, folks can dig deep for a lucky prediction as to when Tripod Charley will float off downriver in Bethel's most anticipated declaration of spring.
