The 115th Saranac Lake Winter Carnival is underway. A huge fireworks display Saturday night marked the kickoff of the 10 day festival. Every year, the Carnival is highlighted by the Ice Palace. It's a castle made of ice blocks that can get up to 60 foot high and 90 foot wide ice. This year's theme for the event is Space Alien Invasion and our Brian Dwyer takes us inside the palace to see how crews turned it into a scene straight from outer space.

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FRANKLIN COUNTY, N.Y. -- Early Saturday afternoon, people were getting their first look.

Every year, the Village of Saranac Lake builds a massive ice palace for its winter carnival. A couple of weeks before the carnival starts, crews from the I.P.W., Ice Palace Workers, cut blocks of ice two foot by four foot from nearby Lake Flower and pile them, some years, 60 feet high, 90 feet long and 30 feet wide. It comes complete with thrones, tunnels, mazes and more.

"Really nice. I like the theme they have behind it. It's great for the kids. It's something special," Saranac Lake resident Rich Gaudete said.

This year's theme is Space Alien Invasion. Inside of the ice palace, there's all sorts of ice sculptures of aliens and guns and outside of it things like UFOs and even a spaceship.

"It's a fun theme. We get people to dress up as aliens. There's a lot of things you can do with that theme," I.P.W. and Carnival Committee member Jeff Branch said.

"Very impressive," Richard Zimmerman of Rochester said. "Even on the spaceship out front, it's got dials chipped right into it. It's very impressive, the details."

Details that look even more impressive at night. There's hundreds of lights that make the palace glow. People say it's an amazing sight.

"I am totally impressed that somebody could do such an amazing ice sculpture. I thought it was great," Tara Burke of Buskirk, New York said.

"I like the green stuff on it," young Ethan Edwards of Tupper Lake added. "I like the alien theme. I just wanted to come see the theme this year."

And believe it or not, even with the warm weather, crews say they pretty much worked uninterrupted with only two rain days and the palace was never in jeopardy.

"Last year we were spoiled," Branch said. "We had a great year, but there's been many years where we've actually had to tear down the castle and put it back up. But we'll never go without a castle."

And the 10,000 or so people who'll walk through it this year are very happy that's the case.

There are events all week at the carnival, but Saturday at 1 p.m., there's a huge parade through downtown and then Sunday night, the festivities wrap up with a slide show of the week's events and another fireworks show over the castle.

Once the carnival ends Sunday night, the palace will stand for another week or two before crews tear it down. The chunks go back into the lake and sort of recycle for the following year.