Austin Greenleaf has a chill job. As one of the many ice artists for Minus5 Ice Bar’s three Strip locations, Greenleaf constructs life-size displays at some of the coolest lounges around town. He chatted with the Weekly about his carving journey, his love for chainsaws and his latest work at Mandalay Bay.

How long have you been an ice carver? Right around six years. I picked it up at a culinary school. That’s where I got introduced to the world as a whole.

Wait, you learned ice carving in culinary school? How does that happen? By accident mostly (laughs). I went to culinary school at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute in Coos Bay. There was a chef on campus named Chris Foltz, who was an international wood and ice carver. He worked on campus, and he would teach a couple of kids every year how to ice carve. ... I was not one of those kids, but I found out when his practices were and started showing up until I wore him down, and he taught me how to do it.

What about ice carving appealed to you? The action was the main thing. When I got to campus, he was doing a live demonstration in the middle of the quad, when everybody was getting introduced to choir or sports teams. You’re walking around [and] you hear a chainsaw running, which is very difficult to ignore. You walk up and there’s this guy with this giant chunk of ice and snow flying everywhere. Then, 45 minutes later, there’s a beautiful piece of art. That drew my interest, and I wanted to find out more.

How intensive is this kind of work? When you’re working on smaller stuff, not so much. But when we’re working on the ice bars, it’s a real ramp-up when it comes to the physicality of it. All three of our locations—at Mandalay Bay, at Grand Canal [Shoppes at Venetian] and at the Linq—[are] about 650 to 750 blocks of ice. It’s around 85 to 90 tons when we’re bringing it in for a full build-out. Moving that amount of material around can be very physically demanding. In the Grand Canal specifically, we’re raising it up around 13 to 14 feet for the final layer. And the blocks we’re moving are around 220 pounds. When you’re lifting that amount of weight up to that level, it’s psychologically demanding, because of the risk factors with other guys around. Stuff can go bad quickly, so you need to be very aware of what is going on.

How else do you combat melting? When we’re working on the bars, they’re going to be at a constant temperature. We’ll bring ice, and everything stays right around 18 to 20 degrees. Those are typically the temperatures that our freezers run, and we’ll work on everything inside the bar. But recently, I did a couple of live carvings for St. Patrick’s Day and March Madness at our Linq location, right on the Promenade. I carved a couple of leprechauns, and then we did an interactive basketball hoop that we set up like a little carnival shoot-around game. But it was around 75 or 80 degrees, so when you’re doing that you need to know that your medium is trying to shift on you and change into a completely different form. ... Sometimes when you’re working on it, dry ice can be very good to counteract. But most of the time, it’s working quickly and knowing that certain details are gonna go away.

What sorts of tools do you use to create your pieces? I’ve been to a good amount of international competitions, and it seems like every time you go, somebody’s found something [new] that they can modify and work with on the sculptures. At one point, I found a group of guys from Lithuania who were using horse brushes, like rounded horse brushes with small teeth. … The more modern way of carving is very mechanical based. Lots of chainsaws, die grinders. The more old-school methods are a lot of sharpened chisels and big hand saws.

Do you have a preference? I really enjoy the chainsaw. It might not be perfect at doing everything, but it does everything, which is very handy when you’re trying to do stuff quickly. When your medium is trying to melt on you, sometimes speed is really the most important thing.

What new pieces have you carved for Minus5 at Mandalay Bay? We tore out a couple of sections of the walls, and we rebuilt one of them into a rock ’n’ roll theme. Old-school album covers are all over the place, guitars, themed lightning bolts. It’s very action-packed and cool to look at.

We [also] have a little VIP room, a tiki lounge surfer hangout with palm trees, and we carved a 12-foot-tall surfboard and hung that on one of the walls. Tiki guys all over the place. It was a very cool vibe to carve.

What’s a favorite piece you’ve created over the years? I was in a support role on a couple of teams that went up to Alaska for the world championships in Fairbanks … and the blocks that they cut out of the lake are about the size of a VW Bug. For the big ones, you get nine to 10 blocks of that and six days to carve them. They move the blocks around—you have to ratchet-strap everything down, and they’re lifting it 20 feet in the air.We did a couple of dueling dragons [once], and then [later] we did an underwater mermaid and a scuba diver theme. Those are two of the coolest things I’ve gotten to work on.

Is there a specific ice you prefer to work with, or water you use for better ice? We have specific companies that produce blocks for us. They get made in a thing called a clinebell machine, which is directionally frozen, and it freezes it to the dimensions that we get blocks [in].

When we get a raw block, one that hasn’t really been processed at all, it’ll be 20 inches wide by 40 inches tall and about 10 inches thick. Those blocks run about 270 to 280 pounds. A lot of the time when they’re getting made, they have reverse osmosis machines that run the water through to purify it. As the water is being frozen in that directionally frozen clinebell maker, water pumps will be added. So if the water is moving as it’s freezing, it keeps all the oxygen from becoming stagnant. And that typically, plus impurities, is what causes that whit,e cloudy look.

If you’re moving and it’s freezing, it’ll freeze crystal clear. A lot of the time, you can look in one of those machines, and you’ll think that it’s completely water. You touch it and an inch down, it’s ice. So for 11 inches down, it’s completely clear, because it was moving properly during the freezing process.

You sound like a scientist. I’ve thought about ice a lot in the last six years. … When it comes to fusing, when you have two big pieces of ice you need to stick together, we have all these individual blocks. It looks like a brickwork pattern, but as you’re going through, we need to seam it together as tight as possible so that our structures are very strong. There’s different ways of locking blocks together—inserting water, mixing a little snow and water and making something called slush to fill any gaps and seams. Then that mixture will freeze solid and fuse everything together.

It’s like a mortar when you’re building a brick wall. It’s very similar but in a different medium.

What’s the most rewarding part of your job? We’ve been shifting over to a kid-friendly or an all-inclusive vibe— everybody can come in and experience this thing . And when kids come in and you see the look on their face at something that I got to carve in the morning, they’re in awe. ... They’re just touching everything and running around as kids do. Those little moments where you catch them looking and trying to figure out what is happening makes it feel worth it.

MINUS 5 ICE BAR Three Valley locations, minus5experience.com/icebar.

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