Relative Something

In the end, I didn’t get as far on the igloo as I had wanted to. I’m kind of frustrated that it went as slow as it did. I saw on the Grand Shelters web site that they claim it only takes between 1 1/2 – 3 hours to complete. We achieved 4 rows in many hours over two days.

I think it will work pretty slick, eventually, but I have a lot of practice to do to master the subtleties involved. There is a very fine art to pressing the snow to compact it and displace air without pressing too hard and fracturing the block. You don’t know how much pressure is too much until it is too late, and at the same time, you are never sure when you have sufficiently compacted a block. And the variability of snow crystals means the parameters of determining these factors is constantly changing. I think it requires generations of Inuit tribal knowledge to even have a chance to perfect this.

To their credit, Grand Shelters do demonstrate on their DVD that it can be done even when the snow is dry and the texture of sugar. That’s what we had to work with this weekend. Before now, I would never have guessed that to be possible, but that is indeed what we accomplished.  Many thanks to Mike and Barb for their contributions to this project!