When the Agassiz-Harrison Lions Club voted in 1986 to contribute two hundred dollars toward the cost of a sand sculpture demonstration, they could have never imagined that, just four years later, they would be involved with a world championship competition and the Guinness Book of Records.

At that time, the world championship sandcastle contest was being held in White Rock, BC. Drawing crowds of 100,000 people, it proved to be too successful, as it also drew a rowdy element that vandalized the small town and forced the White Rock council to ban the event.

Lion John Green thought there would be potential for a sandcastle event in Harrison Hot Springs so he persuaded the Lions Club and the Chamber of Commerce to put up two hundred dollars each to bring expert sculptors from White Rock to build a demonstration sculpture on the beach in Harrison Hot Springs. Harrison’s sand was pronounced suitable for “sand castling,” so the Lions’ sand sculpting committee staged the first contest in the spring of 1987.

The first contest was a local success with the Harrison Hot Springs Hotel, Ledoux Hardware, Kent Agencies, Kent Fashions and other area businesses sponsoring teams of employees. The committee was encouraged to continue, so they scheduled another contest for the fall with the hotel offering a first prize of two thousand dollars. This attracted teams from Vancouver and Seattle who produced spectacular results in a four-hour contest.

Early in 1988, the Harrison Hot Springs Sand Sculpture Society was formed with Lion John Green as its first president. The new society scheduled events in the spring and fall with support from the Lions, the Harrison Hotel and Fraser Valley Broadcasting (Radio CHWK). Both events were hit with cold, wet weather and while the quality of the entries continued to increase, the hoped-for crowds of spectators did not.

In 1989, fortune smiled. Fraser Valley credit Union joined the Lions and the Chamber of Commerce to sponsor the 1989 Harrison Open Sand Sculpture Contest. The date was announced as the first Saturday after Labor Day, but the Credit Union wanted their employees to participate and most of them worked on Saturday. What to do? After consulting the master sculptors, the society decided to stage a two-day contest with the masters working five hours each day.

The sun shone brightly on both days and the resulting crowd was the largest Harrison Hot Springs had ever seen. The sculptures were magnificent, with two of them over fifteen feet tall. As a result, the committee couldn’t bring themselves to allow their immediate destruction, so a small binder-twine fence kept the kids away for another three days. Harrison’s technical advantage over other ocean side sandcastle contests had been discovered! With no tide, there was no need to restrict sculptors to a four or five-hour period, and with no incoming tide, these works of art were not destroyed immediately after the contest.

The society also decided to take advantage of having all the master sculptors together and held a free dinner in the elementary school gymnasium to discuss future events in Harrison Hot Springs. The third advantage was born; Harrison’s hospitality toward visiting sculptors gave them an opportunity to meet and learn from other sculptors and help to keep their costs down.

The fourth advantage, the quality of Harrison’s sand, had now also become obvious. With two sculptures over fifteen feet tall built without any sign of collapse, the masters pronounced Harrison Hot Springs to be the best sand in the Pacific Northwest and talked about twenty-foot sculptures for the following year.

John green wrote to the Guinness people hoping to establish fifteen feet as the new record for hand-built sandcastles. While they weren’t prepared to recognize that one, they were prepared to create a new category, tallest hand built sandcastle, based on the Harrison competition that imposed a 100-manhour limit on its construction. In April of 1990, a coalition of sculptors from British Columbia and Washington, USA, completed a castle that stood seventeen feet five inches and was duly recognized by Guinness as a new world record.

END PART ONE

PART TWO

Chamber of Commerce manager, Bob Bell, persuaded the Chamber’s board of directors to get behind the event and the Chamber subsequently announced that the 1990 World Championship Sand Sculpture Competition would be held on the weekend after Labor Day. Needing more revenue to support the event, the society requested permission to charge admission to the competition and to hold a subsequent one-week exhibition period. Crown lands approved this application and the genesis of the current event was established.

With success came problems. Not the least of these was the question of keeping the sculptures up during an exhibition period. Several professional sand sculptors recommended a product developed by the United States Navy to reduce sand erosion along coastal waterways. This water-soluble, acrylic polymer was called Weather Tect, and proved to be the answer for keeping the moisture inside the sculpture. In fact, at the end of the first week of the exhibition, the sculptures were all in excellent condition, which led to a decision to keep them up for a month the next year.

It is standard practice at ocean side contests to allow the kids to trample the sculptures just before the tide sweeps in to destroy them. In Harrison, we were able to stop this with a simple announce-ment on the PA system. But what about late at night when no one was around? Plans to create Sand Sculpture Park on the south side of the lagoon were approved by council, to include fencing and lighting of the event.

Up until the 1990’s, ten-person teams were the accepted norm for master’s competition. But the cost of air travel from California or Florida was prohibitive and attracting teams from outside the Pacific Northwest was not likely. It was obvious that many sculptors around the world worked alone on their local beaches and had little contact with sculptors. Thus, in 1991, a solo class was established, with Fraser Valley Credit Union committed to sponsoring the class. By 1992, there were as many solo entries as teams and they included the first two sculptors from Europe, Lars van Nigtevgt and Sikke-bart Freiling of the Netherlands.

With the additional cost of travel, fencing, lighting, and night security now added to the event, admission was raised to $2.50 for adults. Children and Harrison Hot Springs residents still got in free. To be truly competitive, small teams requested that they, too, have one hundred man-hours to complete their sculptures. This was subsequently approved, meaning that two-person teams started as early as Wednesday, with three and four-man teams starting Thursday. Additional hours were given to the solo competitors, too, so they started of Friday and worked through to finish on Sunday.

Small teams now started to arrive on Tuesday or even Labor Day, and others arrived early to try out the sand or simply to socialize prior to the event. Providing accommodation, food, and opportunities to meet sculptors from around the world became the hallmark of the world championships. Townspeople got to recognize the sculptors from previous years and their small-town hospitality soon made Harrison Hot Springs a “don’t miss” stop on the sand sculpture tour.

In 1991 and again in 1993, sculptors raised the height of the world’s tallest sandcastle. The present record stands at twenty-three feet six inches and the pictures have put Harrison Hot Springs on the map, as they have appeared annually in the Guinness Book of Records.

In 1994, under President Soren Klein, the first sculptor from Asia attended. He was Manmohan Mahapatra of Orissa, India, and he won the Sculptor’s Choice award. In 1996, the first team from Japan competed with two teams from Europe, as well as entries from Canada and the United States. In total there were thirty entries.

But the financial success of the event was always dependent on the weather. We had storms during past competitions, but it rained for the whole five days of competition in 1996 and every weekend of the exhibition. At the end, the society was eight thousand dollars in debt and unable to pay its most loyal suppliers. The society decided to hold a fundraiser at the Memorial hall in November. President Bruno Giannotta organized a dinner and all the local restaurants donated. Fraser Valley Credit Union donated a diamond bracelet for a raffle and almost every business in town donated items for the silent auction. The entertainment featured Mayor Don Ramsay at the piano and his friend, John A. White, a comedian, who had the large crowd rolling in the aisles. At the end of the night, the society had raised ten thousand dollars and was able to proceed with the 1997 contest. It attracted thirty entries again, but torrential rains at the end of September raised the lake level enough to flood the sculptures and close the exhibition gates ten days early. In 1998, the largest field ever competed with eleven teams and twenty-five solos. Once again, their work was spectacular, the weather was beautiful, and people came out to enjoy it all.

The society’s primary goal has always been to extend the tourism season into the shoulder seasons and this has been achieved to a startling degree. Surveys reveal that the twenty-five to thirty thousand people who attend the world championships generate about $1.75 million of direct spending in our local economy. Using a standard multiplier, the gross return to the community is approximately $5.25 million. September is now the best month of the year for most area businesses. Quite a return on that original investment of two hundred dollars!