The Children’s Museum of Phoenix hosted SandFest 2021 last weekend, dumping 200 tons of sand in Adventure Play. The event included sand sculpture building and family activities.
The festival featured various entertainment for children and families, including massive sand piles, rock painting and a soapy bubble waterfall. The museum has hosted this event since 2015. Four valley businesses competed on teams to create the best sand sculpture for the grand prize, a golden shovel.
Special guests included Sand Guys from Travel Channels’ show “Sand Masters” and Mayor Kate Gallego as one of the judges. The Sand Guys have been a part of the event since its inception.
Rusty Croft, one of the Sand Guys, said this year the museum gave them the design prompt, which was the book “The Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle.
“The hardest part about it, I suppose, is that the illustrations are really wonky,” Croft said. “It almost looks like crepe paper collage type stuff, so to make that into a nice sculpture is like a bit of a challenge.”
They made it work anyway.
“I love to inspire the next generation, because that’s how I got into it,” Croft said. “I saw a team doing it. They were outside having fun making something extraordinary out of something ordinary.”
The valley groups from SmithGroup and Okland Construction, and the SmithGroup and DPR Construction were both working on their sculptures Friday morning. Both teams have been part of the event for at least five years.
Georgie Hanlin, director of development for the museum, said the groups were allowed to stagger when they wanted to work for safety. They started sculpting on Friday.
“It’s nice because it is a little more relaxed over two days opposed to one, in years past it has been very focused on the time so it’s a little more stressful,” Doug Nielsen from the SmithGroup and Okland team said
Their group design was a T-rex wrapped around various fossils.
A member of the DPR Construction group, JB Pham, said their design was about being at the beach and outdoors. It featured dolphins riding a wave with turtles and starfish at the base.
The other businesses competing were Plaza Companies and Barker Pacific Group.
Vikky Shilander, a mom of three, brought her children to the museum not even knowing about the event. It was their first time visiting.
Shilander said she would come back once the inside opened back up because it was “pricey for what it is.” She said she wished there was more for the adults or a food truck.
“If I were eating tacos, I would be happy,” she said.
Her kids favorite part of Adventure Play was the bubble machine, which seemed to be a shared sentiment among many kids.
Masks were required, and social distancing and limited capacity rules were implemented. The event had a total attendance of 935 over the two days, according to Hanlin.
“While the weather was cold and, at times, rainy, our sculptors and guests were unfazed. Thankfully, all their hard work wasn’t ruined by the rain,” Hanlin wrote in an email.
At 3 p.m. on Saturday, CEO of the museum Kate Wells, Croft, and Mayor Gallego joined to judge the teams. The DPR team won The Purple Shovel Crowd Favorite prize, and the Okland team won the coveted Golden Shovel Grand Prize.
Contact the reporter etutora@asu.edu.
Elinor Tutora is a staff reporter at Downtown Devil. She is currently a sophomore at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
