I Iglood

The past couple days, it has snowed over a foot at my house. So therefore, the past couple days have been spent outside playing in the snow nearly all day. As you may have gathered from the previous picture posts, I've gone sledding and been turned in to a snowman/monster. I've also helped build a snowman, gone on walks through the snow, and been in a miniature snowball fight.

But nothing I had ever done or constructed in the snow compared to what was built yesterday. For the longest time, I wanted to construct a fort in the wilderness and sleep in it. Even better, an igloo on a mountainside. While being on my front lawn is a far cry from being stranded on a mountainside, I finally fulfilled a wish of mine.

My father, brother, sister and I constructed an igloo on our front lawn. It was finished around 2:00am this morning, is over 9 feet tall, has 18 inch thick walls, weighs over a ton, and took the four of us over 8 hours to complete. It looks quite impressive, neighbors we have never met stopped by to talk about it, the UPS man drove by and gave it a thumbs up, and numerous comments have been said about it by people going by.

We decided to sleep in it. This may have been a mistake. It was 3:00am in the morning when my brother, sister, dog, and I went to bed in the igloo. My brother and sister left at 6:00am in the morning to go inside, leaving just the dog and me in the igloo. Contrary to what I thought, igloos can be very cold inside, so cold you may as well be sleeping outside in the snow. It was a bit worrisome to read about the risks of sleeping in an igloo after we had already decided to sleep in it, about how an igloo that is too tall (like ours) can have all the heat trapped at the top which causes the snow to melt and the structure to collapse while you are in it. Not a great thing to fall asleep thinking about, wondering if I would even survive until morning.

I got a decent nights sleep in the igloo, the entire process of constructing and sleeping in it is something I will remember for a long time. Today my family went sledding down a steep hill at a friends house. It was a bunch of fun once we finally got there. It took around 45 minutes for us to get our car out of the snow once it got stuck on our way to sled. This snow has been amazing and it appears will be around for quite some time.