Outdoors: Building a quinzee

 I am the scoutmaster for a local ScoutsBSA troop and today was "Let's Build Snow Shelters Day".  In the sometimes frozen north, we are faced with the dilemma of camping in the snow if we don't want to exclude a good 33% of the year.  One option is to sleep in a tent but that is often a very cold proposition.  The other is the cozy warmth of a Quinzee.

Quinzee, from a Northwestern Canadian native word, means snow shelter.  It's like an igloo but with one major exception: mounds versus blocks. An igloo is made by stacking blocks of ice or snow into a dome structure.  A quinzee is made by creating a mound of snow in a dome shape and hollowing it out.  Usually we don't have the right conditions for an igloo but we do have good conditions to mound snow, just ask any homeowner clearing the end of their driveway after the county plow truck comes through.

Basic steps to make a quinzee:

1. Make a pile of snow about 10 feet in diameter to a height of 8 feet.  It should be dome shaped when you are done.  This is for a two person quinzee.
2. Let it sit.  Let it sit for quite a while (a couple of hours). No packing needed.
3. Put some foot long sticks into the mound to act as thickness gauges.
4. Pick a spot on the downwind side of the mound for your door.
5. Tunnel into the mound and remove the snow until you find the ends of the sticks.
6. Open a 4 inch diameter hole in the top (to let hot air out)
7. Make some final adjustments: create a raised sleeping area (8 inches high is good)
8. Sleep warm

The engineering:

The dome shape is one of the keys.  That shape is able to hold an incredible amount of weight for its size.  Think St. Louis Arch!

Do you remember the step of letting the snow pile sit?  That is where we let physics do its work.  The action of shoveling the snow into the pile causes the snow flakes to grind against each other and melt slightly.  On a cold day those melted edges refreeze together.  This creates a locked together structure with incredible strength.  During the hollowing out operation, it is possible to remove blocks of snow instead of loose snow (those blocks can get pushed out the opening to create a wall around the entrance).

The foot long thickness is necessary for strength and for thermal insulation.  It also has the benefit that if the structure were to collapse, the weight of snow on you isn't too large and you can just stand up. On a sunny day, you can tell you get the thickness right when you start to see the sunlight through the snow.  Notice in this early build photo how one area shows the sun filtering through the snow and the areas that are still too thick.

Cutting the hole on the top is critical.  It creates a chimney where warm waste gases, think exhaled air and other bodily gases, can rise out of the quinzee while fresh air enters from the door.  

The raised platform moves the sleeping body out of the incoming cold air from the door.  

Making the door way as small as possible is necessary to maintain the warmth inside.  How warm can it get?  Some measurements show that you can be as warm as 32F when the outside temperature is -40F.  That insulation value gets killed if your doorway let's too much air exchange too quickly.

Final Thoughts:

The scouts had a blast creating the quinzee.  We discussed how all of the parts came together and created a very good shelter.  At the end of the day, they collapsed the shelter for safety reasons.  In this final photo, you can see them standing on top of the quinzee without it collapsing.  They're sold on a quinzee for winter camping now and look forward to the next time we head to the woods.