One of the best things my step-father ever taught me was how to build a proper snowfort. Oh sure, I’d carved out a few cubbies in snowdrifts before, but nothing like the labyrinthine lairs I soon began developing like missile bases under the snow. Assembling a good snow fort is an all-day endeavor. It’s work. But the rewards—a toasty nest in which a kid can kick back with a candle, some cocoa, and a few books for a few hours—are totally worth it. If nothing else, it’s an early lesson that the best things sometimes take a little sweat.
Prerequisites: You’ll need some snow, obviously, but not as much as you might suspect—enough to get a shovel under without hitting mud. More importantly, you need a crisp day, well under freezing. A little melt can cause seriously structural issues that are difficult to mitigate.
Each participant will need a good, broad snow shovel. A wheel barrow would not be a bad thing to have, but a tarp could be used to port snow in a pinch. Various garden or kitchen tools may be useful, but are not necessary. A cheap plastic sled, with a flat bottom and high sides, is highly recommended.
Water-resistant gloves are critical. Your hands are the best tools you have, but you’ve got to keep them warm. And dry, too—make sure you dry out your gloves when you head back inside to warm up, which you should do probably at least every 90 minutes or so. A snowsuit is highly recommended.
Okay, let’s build a god damned snow fort.
Picking a location - You can build a snow fort anywhere, but there’s something to be said for taking advantage of the existing terrain. A tree can make an interesting center support for your fort, but be sure that the above limbs aren’t so heavy with ice and snow that they’ll be crashing down. Taking advantage of an existing large drift can be a good idea, but bear in mind that you’ll be in the wind’s way. (That’s fine, but it may affect your door position.) A side of a house, shed, or even car can provide good support at least one wall you don’t have to build, but make sure you don’t rely too heavily on it. The walls of your finished fort should optimally be all snow, because that’s more nifty.
Most importantly, determine where you can assemble the biggest pile of snow with the least amount of effort.
Harvesting your snow - Getting your raw materials is a step most folks would rather skip, but it’s essential to snow fort greatness. It’s going to take a lot of backbreaking labor, but that’s what kids are for, right? After you’ve selected your location, begin moving snow from the rest of your yard into a pile. This is going to take forever. I’ve spent entire days making my piles without even beginning to carve out my fort, but I’m sort of nuts.
As you pile the snow, compress it. This is crucial. The weight of the snow will gain you some free compression, but you’ll need to whomp it with your shovel, roll around in it, or take little jaunts down the mound with a flat-bottomed sled. (This is a good job for younger kids who are too small—or let’s face it, too lazy—to haul hundreds of pounds of snow around the yard.
If your snow is coming up dirty (usually because the snow isn’t very deep on the ground), leave an undisturbed patch of snow near your mound to be used as clean “plaster” later.
Build your compressed mound up to at least the size of a small car. Then build it up a little more. Then build up the sides of the mound so it looks less like a mountain and more like a loaf of bread.
Excavating - Here’s where it starts getting fun.
You can do some room planning, but really the shape of your room (or rooms) will be dictated by the shape of your mound. It would be best to enter from the south side, presuming the coldest winds are blowing from the north. Begin by carving a slot into the side of the mound just wide enough for your plastic sled, which will now serve as a snow cart, removing the carved snow from inside the fort, preferably into a second, adjacent mound which will be carved into a second room or nook.
Try to get your entrance as close to the ground as possible without hitting the grass or dirt, then move inward. (Don’t worry if you cut a little deep; you’ll naturally build up the floor as you excavate.) Push the front of the sled into your slot until it butts against the bottom of the mound, then use your hands to cut snow out of the mound into the sled. Once the sled is full, slide it out of the slot and dump it. (Again, this is great work for kids, especially with two sleds that can be set up in rotation.)
(Don’t hog the fun part all to yourself, but make sure you are keeping an vigilant eye on your kids during the initial excavations, when it’s possible several pounds of snow could fall in on them if you didn’t do a good job packing your mound.)
Carve out your rooms, leaving about a foot of snow for walls. If you can see sunlight shining through the snow, you’ve gone too far. Your goal is to always carve through, if possible, after you’ve made your initial punch into the side for your door. Once you have enough room inside your fort to fit inside, start carving from the bottom of the mound up, the better to prevent a cave-in. (Just don’t get under a big snow pack if you can help it.)
The trick is to be conservative as possible with your dimensions while not leaving too much snow above to weigh down your ceilings and walls. It’s very easy to cause a structural failure but very difficult to repair one. The shape of your rooms should be domed rather than squared off. Fortunately, that’s the natural shape your excavations will make. A decently-packed mound will allow you to build rooms that are just big enough for an adult male to sit upright within, but probably not able to totally stretch out. You can try to buttress the ceilings with load-bearing walls, but it’s a challenge. Instead, consider carving out a second room if you have the mound real estate for it.
Gussying Up - So you’ve got your fort basically built, with as small of an entrance as possible and strong, opaque walls. It’s probably going to be pretty dark inside, which is a good sign that it won’t immediately come crashing down—especially when you roll up a big ball of snow or stuff an old blanket in the hole for the door.
You can light up a candle, but please make sure you leave a couple of air holes for fresh air to come in and mix. A single candle isn’t really good for much light, but it can provide a surprising amount of heat—snow is a great insulator. (Frankly, though, just the body heat of its occupants will keep most forts plenty toasty.)
Consider a readily-available resource: the icicle, nature’s own fiber-optic lighting system. Snap a few off of the gutters and jam them, pointy end first, into the tops and sides of your fort. They’ll bring in a surprisingly amount of light. (Although, now that I think about it, I’ve never tried pushing them in from the inside. That could be interesting, although you’d have to be a lot more careful about not pushing a hole right out the side of your fort.)
You can also break out large sheets of clean ice and install them as windows. Like anytime you punch a hole through the side of your fort, you’re risking disaster, but start with a modest piece, smaller than a sheet of notebook paper, and you’ll probably be fine. Don’t be afraid of using a piece nearly as thick as the walls of your fort. You’re just going for light without compromising structure, not a bay window.
Advanced snow masons can make their own icicles and window panes beforehand, which affords both uniformity in shape and the ability to add food coloring. That’s right—colored light and stained glass.
Making it last - Your fort will already do pretty well on its own, even if temperatures tiptoe into the 30s. (Use your noggin, though, and don’t let kids play in a fort you don’t trust.) A little snow melt from the sun can actually help if it has the chance to refreeze into ice. But you can make your work stand the test of time by taking that idea to its logical extreme: icing the whole thing down yourself.
It’s delicate work, because you don’t want to melt the fort all the way through, but done properly it can create a fort that will last for weeks. Start slowly, with hand held bottles of water that can be used to mist the outside of the fort. (You can use food coloring again here, but I find the results lacking.) Your secret weapon would be a garden hose with a misting attachment at the end, so long as it provides an extremely gentle mist. Work from a distance, letting the water have some time to cool in the air before it hits the fort. And you’ll want to work in layers, giving the ice time to build up. (Don’t wait so long that your hose freezes up, though, because it’ll crack.)
Resist the urge to blast your kid in the face with the hose, despite the fact that it would be hilarious.
If the weather remains below freezing for several days, you can continue to build up the ice layers. Once you’ve got the first layers established, it’s pretty difficult to screw it up, so long as you keep the misting uniform. (As usually with snow forts, the top remains the most delicate part, but if you can get a hard, candy shell over the whole thing, even the roof of your fort will be pretty tough.)
Once you have a layer of ice around your fort that’s a couple of inches thick, you can began to excavate out the interior snow with less worry about structural failure, even bringing portions of the walls right up to the ice to create actual window-sized windows.
Igloos/bricks - Some have championed the use of bricks to build up walls. I have not had much luck with brick-based snow forts, but thousands of Inuit can’t be wrong. If you’ve figured out the trick to making lasting walls with bricks without dealing with continual collapse, I’d love to learn your secrets. That said, a proper snow fort has a roof, so don’t give me any of this “castle walls” crap. That may work for a snowball fight, but it’s no true fort.
See also: A ’snow fort’ for the adult in you [Christian Science Monitor]
Image via Jaboobie’s flickr stream.
32 Responses to “How To: Build a Badass Snow Fort”
- 1 Pingback on Mar 2nd, 2007 at 11:39 am
- 2 Pingback on Mar 2nd, 2007 at 1:09 pm
- 3 Pingback on Mar 2nd, 2007 at 1:09 pm
- 4 Pingback on Mar 4th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
- 5 Trackback on Mar 4th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
- 6 Pingback on Mar 5th, 2007 at 2:51 am
- 7 Pingback on Mar 5th, 2007 at 11:15 am
- 8 Trackback on Apr 18th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Another thing I forgot to teach you?
Dad
Amazing devotion, mr. Joel, I am truly impressed. I have once used christmas lights in side my forts to provide glowing snow, It is both beautiful and architecturally safe. I have slept in snow shelters before and yet I have never known about these ice windows
you so illustriously speak of. As for brick igloos, I always find a domed like apparatus, to place on top of my circlular brick wall. After it is attached, I cover it with snow and water and freeze the snow and water. I can then remove it from inside the fort and be left with an ice roof. Quite splendid indeed.
Best wishes in the art of snow-craft,
Eddy Masterson
The Inuits were (and still are) able to build igloos because of the snow they were using. Permafrost snow is much more dense than the snow we use, thus allowing them to make “bricks” that will hold up.
Joel, very good explanation of how to build a snow mound and hollow it out. I have never tried this, but I have built a successful igloo out of snow blocks. I was in New Jersey and not above the arctic circle, so I don’t think it has anything to do with the permafrost.
I took a plastic storage tub, one that was about two feet long and a foot and a half wide, and filled it up with snow, packing it down several times by jumping up and down inside the tub. This made very large snow blocks which could be unmolded one at a time in the proper location. I made an igloo out of the blocks which was probably five or six feet tall. To make it more round, I filled in the spaces between the blocks with loose snow. The igloo lasted at least five days and was big enough for maybe two people to sit in.
One downside to this method is that the tub becomes VERY heavy when filled with packed snow, and it would be easy to get a hernia from lifting one of them, especially when you get to the third or fourth row up. I have heard of people using shoeboxes, but I didn’t have much luck with this.
Ahhh, memories.
We used to do this, build them accross the street and accross yards from each other. Bricks were used to build ‘outter walls’, for the snowball fights. If properly built against a low wall, you can dig right tothe wall, or along it. Great stuff, nice read.
Just wanted to say I really enjoyed your writing, and we don’t even have snow in San Francisco!
In reply to David:
What you did is essentially the same thing as permafrost snow, you just used a different method. However, your method is much more time consuming than just cutting blocks of snow out of the ground. The best igloos that Inuits have made are constructed of snow blocks gathered from the ice caps. The snow found in ice caps is extremely dense because of it’s age.
Regardless, we agree on the same principle: Snow blocks need to be constructed from dense (or compressed) blocks of snow. Simply trying to make blocks of snow without a form and compression will not work.
Another cheap trick: once the plow man went by (assuming a significant snowfall), we would take my cheap sled (which was really just a long piece of plastic with some rope handles) and a baseball bat and cut sled-sized bricks out of the hard-packed plowed snow. Assuming you can extract and carry the bricks, this is a quick way to build walls.
And icing it all down is a necessity. Why wait for an arms race to push you toward what needs to be done?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0120/p11s01-lihc.html
Ah, to look back upon your youthful activities and think: “I can do that now…only BETTER!” ;)
Snow forts are very fun. Thanks for the instructions :D If only I had enough snow to try them on.
This post cries out for photographic documentation.
I go for the igloo style, with bricks made from snow compacted in a recycling bin. I make an igloo big enough for five people to fit. Walls and ceiling are 18-24 inches thick and will support weight of adult standing on roof. I also use a tarp that is silvered on one side to keep the sun’s rays off the igloo when the weather starts to warm up. Sometimes, I’ll keep the igloo intact while all the snow on the lawn has melted.
Another hint: instead of creating blocks of snow, make the kids roll LOTS of head-sized snow balls. Build walls laying the balls in a brick pattern, filling spaces with more snow. Tip: after your wall is some 3ft high, let it rest for the night and work on the roof tomorrow.
That’s how we’ve done it back when I was a kid. We were able to create (without shovels) a fort I could freely stand inside, not being a very small kid at 10 yrs old.
Using Bricks:
http://howesound.wordpress.com/2006/12/28/time-to-build-an-igloo/
Unfortunately, although TJ is right that Inuit (no “s” - Inuit means “the people”) use a specific kind of snow to build igloos it has nothing to do with the permafrost. Permafrost is continuouslly frozen ground. The type of snow on top of that frozen ground depends on many things, including precipitation, temperature, wind, etc. but not on the permafrost.
As for the right kind of snow being cut from ice caps, that’s also not-quite right. Ice caps are permanent glaciers that are often far away from the land and sea where caribou, seals and other animals live. Inuit build igloos when they are living and travelling on the land - they wouldn’t do that very far from their source of food, so it would be awfully rare for them to find an ice cap from which to build their igloo. They simply find the right conditions to make the type of snow they need to build their igloo and away they go.
It’s amazing to watch them construct a true igloo!
PS. The type of super-fantastic snow fort Joel’s describing is sometimes also called a “quinzhee/quinzee” (minus the ice layers). I’ve slept in them many times and been toasty warm.
A true igloo uses a heat source to slightly melt the insides of the igloo once it is built. An igloo is also stronger if built in a shape similar to the St. Louis arch–not a 1/2 sphere dome. Normally a candle or lantern of some kind is used to promote the melt. The door and smoke flap is then opened and the melt water cascading down the inside walls flash freezes. The base is also reinforced and body fluids are used to slick up the outside surface. This forms a laminated ice shell that will prevent a polar bear from crashing in in the night when there are dancing shadows through the translucent igloo (as seen from the outside). Try that at home. Have a 900 pound nine foot tall beast try to crush you and your family in the outside dark. Most homes aren’t built that well. It’s also why dogs are stationed outside the igloo.
Thanks for a great snow fort how-to.
I live in Utah and we usually get quite a bit of snow and build snowforts when we can. This year has been pretty dry for us and if we only have a small amount of snow we can quickly clean the yard and have a pile too small to use.
One way to get around this is to stack something bulky in the yard and pile the snow on top of it and compact it. Then just cut your door and pull out the guts and most of your work is now done. This idea came from winter camping (use your backpacks and a tarp) but works equally well with bags full of leaves that never made it to the compost facility. You could also leave them in the yard in the fall in anticipation of the storms that are sure to come later.
Canugurl, I said permafrost snow. I didn’t say “just permafrost”. I was reffering to the snow on top of the permafrost.
Also, I appologize for my improper use of the term Inuit. My bad. That does make me sound kind of inbred.
peace
I was reading this and thinking wow this is a lot like how I build my snow forts. My snow forts are always a work in progress. I usually add the snow I dig out to the outside along with some new snow so it always keeps growing throughout the winter. This last winter I could just about stand in it and I fit four of my friends in it with me. I have pictures of it on my website http://snowforts.ath.cx
The Inuits were (and still are) able to build igloos because of the snow they were using. Permafrost snow is much more dense than the snow we use, thus allowing them to make “bricks” that will hold up.
Another cheap trick: once the plow man went by (assuming a significant snowfall), we would take my cheap sled (which was really just a long piece of plastic with some rope handles) and a baseball bat and cut sled-sized bricks out of the hard-packed plowed snow. Assuming you can extract and carry the bricks, this is a quick way to build walls.
Wow nice i used some of your ideas and made a fort with three rooms and i could run and jump on the fort and it did not break
Another good thing that you can do it hook your hose back up (assuming you’re smart enough to disconnect it before the storm), and then use the “mist” or “flat” setting on your fort, so as to wet it, have it freeze, but not destroy it by using “jet” or “shower”
:D Works great in Indy, and my kids can do it great already.
very good writing; i will try that “ice windows” thing next chance i get. and just to clarify a few things: yes the Inuit (not Inuits) did build igloos out of permafrost snow. this snow is harder and more sturdy than say, lake effect snow. this is why they were able to achieve that wonderful domed shape.
In Scouting we create Quinzees and sleep in them overnight after snowshoeing into the woods… An ingenious way to guarantee consistant thickness with the walls is to snap off straight, dead, thin branches to a consistant length of 10-12 inches. Then you shove them into the mounded pile of snow, aiming at the bottom, center of the structure. A 1-2 foot spacing is fine. Do this from the bottom edge to the peak. Once the snow has settled for a couple of hours, you dig out the interior. When you hit the ends of the sticks you shoved in, you move to another area until you have completed the interior. By using the sticks you remove all guesswork and/or dependance on sunlight to ensure a sufficient wall thickness that doesn’t sacrifice strength (too thin) or interior space (too thick)