Building Igloos always brings a smile to my face, regardless of attitude , or age. Arissara has never seen or heard of one ? And coincidently we seem to have at least 16″ of snow on the ground,, and the best part, is that the temp has moved from -18c to 0c,, which makes it much more fun to build . 😉 as I say this on my warm couch in front of the wood stove on a Sat morning.
There are many ways to build an Igloo, the traditional method, is with snow blocks, however, here in New Hampshire it really is not practical, as there are no blocks, maybe in the Far north, one could cut blocks out of the frozen lake, I have also seen plastic molds , something similar to making bricks. One method is the Pile Way, just pile it up to the desired height and Diameter, than dig it out? Of course the best way ( Lazy way), is to look for snow drifts, and if conditions are correct with enough snow and wind, we could have drifts over 10′ high, the only down side is that you can’t pick the location. I wanted to have this one in the middle of the back yard, so it was the pile method, the difference from previous years, was that we would use a snow blower and just keep going around in a circle, while re-directing the chute toward the center! Literally within an hour we had a 10′ Diameter, as well as 3-4 feet high.. The next step is to let it sit and firm up.. I think I waited to long ? probably a day would do , but I decided to hang out on the couch the following day, than off to work for a week, so I did not get to it for a full week, Yikkes. The problem is that during that week, it got warm , than it went down to -15c.. now the shell of the Igloo was a frozen sheet of snow/ice for at least 8″ , I ended up using my axe to get through the first 8 inches, as I got deeper into it, it didn’t get much easier, but still a little easier. I started the digging, Arissara kept looking at what I was doing from the house, as she is curious and wants to be part of what ever is going on, it did not take long for her to be hip deep in it.
The weird part about digging out igloos is the feeling of claustrophobia , not something that I am susceptible too.. But once you’re in past your hips and the ease of getting out is gone, there is a feeling of un-ease? I have had them cave in, and it is just a matter of standing up, as once it falls, they also lose their structure and no longer have strength? But logic and primal fear are not often aligned.
Once you can get in, that is all the way in and can turn around, things go much faster, especially if you have some one removing the snow from the opening.. We did have plan of spending the night in our new home, I just could not get motivated ,, but who knows..the winter has another month to go. I could stretch out, but as you can see the height could have been 8″-12 ” higher?.Well it has been a few weeks now, and we have been in Portsmouth working , and , and the temp has gone up to 60F with rain,, wonder what will be left. We got in Friday night around 7pm, as we pulled into the driveway we could not help noticing the lack of snow, except for a big pile of snow where our Igloo still was.. One of the first things to check out was , how much was left? As you can see .. it does look sad, but it still stands, with the returning cold weather ,as well as the real possibility of more snow ( NH tends to get most of its snow in Feb).. The Igloo may be revitalized, and reborn ! The next snow fall Arissara and I will build a snow Man!