Building a snow shelter "Quinzee"

During the skiing trip we took a day off from skiing to build snow shelters also called "quinzee" or "quinzhee" the name comes from the Athabascan Indians. Yeah, I've never heard of them either, but apparently they built some mighty fine snow shelters!

Me and Andy at it again. We paired up cos we're about the same size and we needed a big shelter and we don't fuck around. There are probably many ways to build snow shelters, but we did it our way.
First off we marked out a five metre diameter circle for our shelter and Andy tamped the area flat using his ski's. As we soon realised, tamping the snow flat was a complete waste of time, but for some reason it seemed like a good idea and necessary at the time??

We started shovelling the snow into a nice pile and some huskies came to check out what we were up to. We continued to pile up the snow and tap it down now and then to bond the snow crystals. After a couple of hours of shovelling our pile it was almost head height. It could've been a little higher, but we'd had enough.

The next step was to collect, cut or chop a load of wooden stakes about thirty cm's long and hammer them in all around the shelter.The reason for this is so that when we started to dig the shelter out, you keep going until you find the ends of the all stakes. You then know that the walls of the shelter are about thirty cm's thick and plenty strong enough (hopefully).

After leaving your pile of snow for an hour or more to allow the moisture in the different levels of snow to spread among the crystals and the snow crystals to bond it's ready to start digging out. Yes, almost all of that snow you just spent hours piling up now has to be dug out.
Start with a small entrance just big enough to fit through and the opposite direction from any wind, work your way in and up to try and make a space inside that you can sit up in to continue digging just because its easier than lying down. Then with one person inside shovelling snow to the entrance and your mate shovelling snow from the entrance back out to wherever it came from, the inside soon starts to take shape.

The idea is that you build or carve the sleeping areas up from the floor so the cold air sinks into the space below and leaves the rest of the shelter as warm as can be. We shaped the roof as smooth as we could be bothered, so that during the night any melting snow would run down the sides of the shelter instead of drip onto our heads. To finish off we poked a small air vent in the roof to let some air circulate, after all that digging it got ridiculously steam in there.

It might not look like it, but there was loads of room inside. We reckon there could've easily slept three or four people.

In the end I think we counted that it took us about six and a half hours to build start to finish so not exactly a quick shelter, but it was the first time we had built one and there are a few things I'd do differently next time to knock a good bit of time off.

Laters