Clifton Park resident hangs on to winter

PHOTOGRAPHER: Tom McBride

Large snow sculptures adorn a lawn on Nottingham Way North in Clifton Park on Monday, March 26.

CLIFTON PARK — Richard St. Pierre doesn’t claim to be an artist, despite the snow sculptures he created at his home on Nottingham Way.

Multiple snow statues, some of them at least 5 feet tall, occupy St. Pierre’s lawn, although they mostly melted away the past few days.. The engineer said he built the sculptures as part of his effort to stay fit during the winter weekends. He had some help from his son, David.

Each sculpture took about three hours to build, St. Pierre said. He used his hands and a shovel to build them, mostly. And he needed a ladder to work on the tops of the statues. For a particularly detailed blow fish sculpture, safety cones were used to shape the creature’s spikes. To create a snow cat, St-Pierre used long twigs as whiskers.

Other sculptures include an igloo,and a large pair of feet. Oh, and SpongeBob SquarePants.