How To: Build a Badass Snow Fort

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.