Guilderland landscaper builds 20-foot snowman

The mean Professor Hinkle of “Frosty” fame could lock this sucker in a flower house from now until Easter and it wouldn’t melt into a puddle.

Then again, if this monster melted, it would be a lake.

No, monster isn’t the right word. Art, on a massive scale, works better.

The buttons are car tires.

The hat, 8 feet across at the brim, is made from 4-inch drain pipes.

The eyes are wheelbarrow tires.

The nose is a tractor cone.

The arms are more trees than branches.

The corncob pipe? That is a pipe, with a bucket painted yellow attached.

Just another snowman, another 20-foot snowman.

“Nobody likes the cold,” said Scott Leininger, “but it was good for something.

“The snow stays.”

Leininger is a landscaper by trade, so he also plows snow. This nasty winter has been “pennies from heaven” for the Guilderland man. It has also been manna for his art — making a snowman only the biggest of kids can make.

If you drive down Guilderland Avenue just outside Rotterdam, you might see it: a hulking figure that looks like it could snack on a Chevy Suburban.

“You can see it a half-mile away,” Leininger said. Or up close, as a half-dozen drivers did Tuesday afternoon, pulling over slack-jawed to take the behemoth in.

He started on it in November, when the first snow fell. That quickly melted. No worries: It snowed again, and again. Each time, he would plow his front yard into a growing pile.

“I plow for 12 to 14 hours, then I play in the snow,” said Leininger, 36. “I have 3 1/2 acres in the front yard, the size of a football field, and there is no snow left. I can imagine what the neighbors think of me.”

A large snowblower was used to shoot the snow into a taller pile. Hand buckets were also employed. This is his third effort at a mega-snowman, by far his largest and his first in four years.

Leininger has this down. His daughter Grace, now 11, helped on earlier efforts, but this one is just too big. His cousin, Kiel Weston of Guilderland, helped out.

“We’re big kids,” Weston said. “I never stopped making snowmen since I was 10.”

He spent his 32nd birthday Monday risking frostbite working on Frosty — yes, they settled on the name — which is situated on a windswept tundra of a open front yard on a hill.

Leininger figured he put 10 or so actual days into making the pile over four months, waiting for the right day to sculpt his art. That would be the one recent day temperatures did not register as brutal.

“We did most of the shaping on Sunday, when it was above freezing,” Leininger said. “We’d go around in shovels. I have about eight hours into the sculpting.”

On Monday, the cousins braved the wind and cold to put on the finishing touches. On Tuesday, the last piece, the corncob pipe, was installed.

On Tuesday afternoon, the cousins admired their work as commuters coming home from work pulled over and stared. A hand-painted sign asks for donations to support Weston’s fundraising efforts as part of an ironman competition this summer in Lake Placid, with proceeds going to Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (support.themmrf.org/goto/frosty).

While Leininger’s daughter Grace didn’t help on this project, she wasn’t totally left out: Dad did another project on his property.

“I made a snow park for her,” Leininger said. “Well, not just for her. … ”

“He shares,” Grace said.

A kid’s got to play.

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