LATE: Laughter, Adventure, Travel, Eating.: Snow Cave Rave

So living in a snowy region, something that we have had on our list of things to do has been to build an igloo or a snow cave. Definitely out of my normal comfort zone - there are a lot of warnings of the dangers or suffocation and collapse, and it was actually a little intimidating to think of doing it.. but over a few drinks with our awesome neighbour K one week - we decided to set a date, throw out the invite to all our friends, and see who was up for the challenge!

Snow cave gear for two, with a few safety spares for friends.

Last week was the perfect opportunity for it - a late cold wet snap had dropped a metre of fresh snow, and we headed up into the local mountains, to a clearing just off the snowshoe trails of Mt Seymour, near Hidden Lake. I had been up and scoped out the area a week earlier, and there was well over 2.4 meters of snow then. I don't know how deep it was, but Nate backflipped out of a tree and stopped in a soft explosion of powder as he met the ground! Another good thing about keeping it to the local mountains was that after two weeks of sun, and then a huge dump of powder, the avalanche danger was extreme, so we wanted to keep things in an area that wasn't at risk.

Avalanches: Extremely uncool way to end a Snow Cave Rave.

After hiking up for about 45 minutes and then off the path a few hundred metres, we arrived at the clearing:

Site selection

I'd done quite a bit of research on constructing and digging the caves. There were two main options - either piling up the snow into a mound, and then letting it set for a few hours, before hollowing it out, or you could just dig into the side of a drift if the snow was deep enough. The snow was certainly deep enough, so we decided to go for the digging option.

Constructing the entry

Halo around the afternoon sun

Even after the reading and the planning.. the cave just sort of seemed to have an evolution of its own, depending on how easy the snow was to dig and how it fell out as I was digging. I ended up digging down a little deeper than I intended, but after cutting in a nice comfortable entry doorway, I tunnelled upwards back towards the surface, and ended up making quite a large cave, with a couple of steps up onto the main platform that Jo and I slept on. This design turned out to be great, as the entryway was very shielded from the wind, and worked well as a cold sink to drain the cold air out of the cave overnight.

Hollowing out the interior

Entry to the finished cave

Overall it took about 4 hours of digging to dig out and finish up a very spacious cave for 2, plus plenty of room for our gear and an entryway for cooking and putting on boots.