TUPPER LAKE – Much like the rest of this warm and volatile winter, this weekend’s Fire and Ice Festival was hit hard by less than ideal weather.

Saturday around noon, wind gusts ripped off of Raquette Pond and into the Municipal Park where ice sculpting, snow golfing and Clydesdale wagon rides were taking place.

A winter wonderland it was not, but community members and visitors made the most of the conditions.

Out on the Fire and Ice benefit five-hole course, a usual cast of characters took to the links, choosing lower golf irons than the norm thanks to the piercing winds. Amid rain puddles and frozen soil in the park, festival goers huddled into a tent in a pavilion, overlooking several ice fishers on the lake and numerous children taking trips around the park on the Clydesdale wagons.

And in the walkway leading up to the tent, two ice sculptors from Auburn feverishly worked to provide a first ever exhibition for the festival even with the difficult conditions to work with. Thanks to an increase in funding to $9,000 from the $5,000 raised last year in the first year of the expanded festival format, the Fire and Ice Committee was able to bring in two ice sculptors, who set up four nuanced sculptures along the walkway, which held up in the wind.

Matthew Stoddart and Brittany Cunningham, working out of The Ice Farm in Auburn, set up Gillis Realty, Boulevard Wine & Spirits, Lion’s Club, Slush Puppies and ADK Bloody Mary and Tonic sculptures. About a half hour later, Stoddart and Cunningham unloaded three cardboard boxes of blocks of ice from their pickup truck and went to work on an eagle sculpture.

Stoddart and Cunningham used a tracing bit and chainsaw to sculpt the eagle out of the nearly-6-foot-tall column of ice blocks, but had to work quick and carefully thanks to the unrelenting wind, which dulled and softened the sculptures throughout the day.

“This is very abnormal. Usually we don’t do anything in the rain or anything like this,” Stoddart said, in between taking turns chainsawing the finer details of the eagle.

“The temperature is a little warm, nothing we can’t work with, but the wind is a huge factor today,” he added. “It’s going to sublimate a lot of the ice; it’s going to kind of wear away on some of the crisper details a lot faster than it normally would even though it’s a bit warmer.”

On a day where, once again, Mother Nature didn’t cooperate with winter festival plans, Marquis-Day was just happy Stoddart and Cunningham were able to do what they did.

“I’m grateful that we could have ice sculptures this year. At least we can rely on fire and ice versus snow,” she said.

“People seem to be making the best of it,” Marquis-Day added. “Every year the weather is up and down and all over.”

Also new this year were the festival buttons being sold, depictions of local artist Evan Bujold’s Yeti character. Bujold provided a drawing of the Yeti last year for festival T-shirts, but this was the first year the festival used one of his illustrations for a button. Marquis-Day said she hopes to use the character each year, a reoccurring element of the festival with a different spin on the Yeti. On this year’s button, the Yeti held a red golf ball and wore a checkered flat cap golf hat.

As for the golf tournament, in its fifth year, Marquis-Day had no advice on how to tame the elements. But Rotary Club Vice President Jim Merrihew did provide his own recommendations. The lower the iron or fairway wood, the better.

“I would hit a low ball, try to keep it under the wind, but out of the water,” he said. “You’ve got to play left to right with the wind, the wind’s coming off of the lake, which is frozen, and we thought we might have to go with personal flotation devices there later on today.”

The festival weekend also featured a fire dancing show by Fire Magick, fireworks at the park, as well as Zorb ball-racing and dogsled rides from “Call of the Wild” Sunday at the Tupper Lake Country Club.