After having spent an hour uncovering my driveway with snow last night, I began to think back to when a heap of snow was a blessing instead of a curse. That was, of course, when it snowed so much, they cancelled school. Then it was on with the snow pants, coat, gloves and hat, and off to the sledding hill. As I grew older, it meant on with the snowboard pants and up to Loveland pass, where the snowboarding was free so long as you didn’t mind the avalanches.
If for you, however, snow has lost its novelty, I have a fun project for you that just may remind you of the wonders of frozen sky water.
It’s called a quinzee, a safe, inhabitable snow hut, and we’re going to build one! I’ll show you how.
When I was a Boy Scout, I made a couple of them; one at Okpik, where we snowshoed up into the mountains without tents and constructed them in pairs; and another at the Winter Jamboree, where nervous scoutmasters wouldn’t let us sleep in it even though it got to below zero in the tents. Oh, did I mention that these huts are super-duper warm? Well, relatively. If it’s zero degrees outside, 32 degrees (the temperature of snow) is pretty darn toasty.
Let’s get started!
1) Make a big snow pile. Pile up the snow as high as you want it, but DO NOT pack it. It will pack itself as more snow gets piled on.
2) Wait. Now, we were instructed by our Boy Scout leaders to wait 4 hours (but as I’ve already pointed out, they were the over-cautious type) this quinzee INSTRUCTABLE suggests only 30 minutes.
3) Hollow it out. An easy way to make sure your walls are uniform is to insert 8 inch, pre-cut sticks or dowels directly into the walls all around. Then, while you are digging from the center you know to stop when you reach a dowel.
Tada! Your quinzee is finished. And with all the snow you’ve removed from the interior of the hut, you can make a nice wind wall or awesome snow throne as seen here…
