Jeff Skoloda’s relationship with the Ouray Ice Park dates back several years, back to when he began fashioning trophies for competition winners during the annual Ouray Ice Festival and performed ice carving before park officials hired a professional ice sculptor.

The Ouray artist had been kicking around an idea to marry a structure with the talents of the park’s ice farmers — the group of men who utilize a system of thousands of feet of pipes, hundreds of spray nozzles and roughly 200,000 g...