My First Snow Cave

Going to the snow this weekend with my family allowed me to fullfill a childhood desire, to build a snow cave. While my brother and I were trying various ways to actually create a snow shelter, I kept thinking about a recent Popular Mechanics article where the authors took a 3 day survival class out in the dessert. It said the first three days are when the majority of lost people are found. During these three days, the state of mind of the lost person usually determines if they survive or not.

Back to the snow cave: It took us about 2 and a half hours to build one, and we cheated - we had a shovel. Having no experience we learned alot and I would like ot think that I would do well in the first 72 hours.

First we decided to build it against a hill. This would make it easier providing one of the walls. We dug out a hole and then compacted the snow around the hole terracing it as you would if you were laying a foundation for bricks.

Then I began to compact snow away from the shelter and used the shovel to cut out compacted snow bricks. This sounded like a good idea, but the snow was very dry and the bricks kept breaking in half. Also this still did not address how we would be able to 'lean' the walls in the center and have them arch like the ice bricks in an igloo. After we built the walls up about four feet, it really became obvious that arched walls would not work.

Version 2.0 - my brother thought that we could still use our walls would then fill it with snow until we had a nice mound. Then we could compact the snow on the top and dig it out. This worked good, as we had plenty of snow uphill to shovel - but I was looking for something faster.

I climbed to the top of the hill and we built a large snowball. We rolled it around until it was about 4 feet in diameter (and weight a few hundred pounds!) and rolled that down the hill. It grew to 5 feet in diameter and delivered a ton of snow (it also broke down some of the walls we made previously).

A few more minutes of moving snow boulders and shoveling loose snow created quite the mound. Digging out out was the easiest part.

After we finished, we found ourselves scared to allow my kids to go in. There was easily a few hundred pounds of snow that made up the roof. My brother walked along the top to test how easy it would colapse and it held up.

In the end, our shelter was about 3 feet wide and 3 feet tall. Of course, you still need something to keep you dry since the floor is all snow and ice.

After our challenge, I decided to search the internet for recommendations on building a snow shelter. I found a video of someone in Finland doing the same thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jNFy0MKyqY

Other Snow Shelter links:
http://wildwoodsurvival.com/survival/shelter/snow/index.html