Quinzee

While we didn't get a lot of snow before Christmas, a couple of storms have come through leaving us with about 8 inches (just guessing here) of snow.  A perfect amount to make a quinzee...maybe we'd use it to sleep one night or at the very least, the kids would have a snow fort or shelter outside to use...

The first step is to pile up a lot of snow...large areas of the back yard currently look like it hasn't snowed...

The second step is to pack all that snow down...that's where the boys came in...I piled it up and they packed it down...Kieran complained that it was too hard to get to the top of the pile...

Luke...I just threw him up to the top so he could get to work...

After the pile was ready, we would've take sticks (10-15 inches long) and placed them all over the pile to give us a gauge on where the outside of the walls were when we dug it out...to bad the boys made the sticks 2-4 inches long...anyway...we were ready to let it sit for a couple of hours before the dig...

We were digging blind basically, but it worked out...

Lex came out at the end to reap the reward of having a snow shelter....

The air hole sure is nice, brings some nice cool air inside the quinzee...it gets pretty warm inside...

I did make one big mistake with it...when it was all dug out, I was adding more snow to the outside and top of the quinzee and accidentally broke through (the spot directly above Lex's head).  I patched it with a big chunk of snow and added loose snow all around the hole, figure it'll all come together and seal itself...at least that's the hope.

It's big...all four of us can lay down comfortably inside of the quinzee...we'll see what we do with it...