Courtesy photo Participants in last year’s Ice Mass are shown. Ice Mass is returning Friday in Houghton.

HOUGHTON — Building a chapel out of ice and snow was just a ‘fun idea’ until a small group of Michigan Tech students and Fr. Ben Hasse at St. Albert the Great University Parish in Houghton decided to give it a go in 2016. The students got to work, shoveling, forming, and carving the first Ice Chapel. They were soon in awe of how quickly the word spread and how excited people were to come to such an event. It immediately became a yearly tradition, dubbed, “The Ice Mass at the Ice Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows,” or simply, “The Ice Mass.”

The chapel is built each year by college students and community members in Houghton. A mountain of snow; plywood forms held together with 2×4’s; and a workforce of students, shoveling, bucketing, and stomping snow, brings the chapel to life. Each year more students get involved in the build, and offer new creative dimensions. The chapel’s wintery centerpiece, the altar, is built using thick slabs of ice, hand cut from Lake Superior (it’s quite an ordeal to get it in place). Built into the snowy walls, one can find a raised pulpit, a Marian grotto, a hand-carved confessional, corridors along the sides, and beautiful ‘stained ice’ windows.

The priests at St. Al’s will celebrate three planned Ice Masses in the Our Lady of the Snows Ice Chapel, the first of which is live-streamed on Facebook: Feb. 10 at 5:30 p.m. EST. You may visit mtucatholic.org/icemass to register for the link.

Through developing new ways to adorn the chapel and the countless hours it takes to build, students grow together in friendship. When asked how much it costs to build an Ice Chapel, Father Ben Hasse simply responds “about a thousand dollars worth of pizza,” which fuels the student labor.