Winter Wonderland!

A town in Maine built a 122-foot-tall snowperson.

To be a snowman is to live a life of extreme impermanence.

During the coldest parts of the season, these snowy beings take shape on lawns across the world, but by the spring, they’re all but forgotten. However, one snowperson avoided this date with oblivion by entering the history books as the tallest snowman, or rather snowwoman, ever made. Built with 13 million pounds of snow in 2008 in Bethel, Maine, the 122-foot-tall snowwoman was named Olympia in honor of the state’s U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe. “I have to say I’ve joked that it’s just my luck I’d have a world record-breaking monument named after me and it will be gone by summer,” Snowe said at the time.

Bethel residents needed to greatly exaggerate a snowperson’s usually quaint features to complete their creation. In this case, Olympia’s smile was made from car tires, each of her arms was a 25-foot-long spruce tree, and her red stocking cap was 20 feet in diameter and hand-knit by middle school students. Oh, and those lovely eyelashes? Alpine skis. 

Bethel previously earned the title of world’s tallest snowman when the town constructed the 113-foot-tall Angus (named after then-governor of Maine Angus King) in 1999. But Olympia surpassed her forebear, and still holds the Guinness record for the world’s tallest snowperson at the time of writing.

However, the record may not hold for long. In 2020, a snowman in Austria surpassed Olympia’s height — though its extremely tall stovepipe hat did a lot of the work, and the structure has yet to be officially recognized on the Guinness website. Future challengers to Olympia’s crown may one day require the town of Bethel to again gather and build a snowperson to remember.

Here’s to winter fun!