A Room With A View

[Igloo Ed]

I had went up the weekend before to break my route through the bottomless TG snow that is persistent in the Rockies this season with it's scant snow pack.
A team of four of us headed up the trail to find it very firm if not icy in areas where it was blown clean of the recent skiff of snow we received during the week. Most of the trail however had a bit of drifted in snow that was still soft and the going was easy with all four of up pulling pulks laden with all the luxuries of home.
We would need to build a ten foot igloo with a team of four and I knew there was much less snow than previous builds at our camp spot so we wasted no time in getting to camp.
We first spent nearly two hours building a base for the igloo and it was getting dark before we finished the igloo:

We worked late into the night but what a palace it turned out to be:

We put on an igloo addition to use on our third and fourth nights and also did a long day excursion as well as a short moonlit stroll to a near by lake. Everyone had a great time and learned a lot of igloo building techniques.

I went up again the weekend after the trip to check out the igloos and found that the wind had it's way and nearly melted a hole through the windward side. There were some small holes that we patched with some freshly drifted in soft snow to try and help retain our body heat while having lunch in the igloo. It was rather breezy and the calm of the igloo was welcomed but it didn't warm up much in the short time we were there. The sun also came out and it felt warmer to be outside in the sunlight behind the igloo that offered some protection from the wind.

The two igloo were built so they overlapped and then we cut most of the wall out to make a huge door from one igloo to the other:

Even with the scant snow we were able to get a very tall door:

Door.jpg (11.38KiB)Viewed 27340 times

Looking out the door was pretty cool too:

[Kiwi Beeman]

Great double igloo, neat idea.
Did the pit go all the way through the first igloo to allow access the the second?
Do you have any pictures showing the inside?
Regards
Paul B

[Igloo Ed]

Great double igloo, neat idea.
Did the pit go all the way through the first igloo to allow access the the second?
Do you have any pictures showing the inside?
Regards
Paul B

We dug the trench in the ten foot igloo as laid out in the manual for four people and left it that way.
The eight foot igloo was joined such that we crawled across the single person spot in the ten footer. We only slept one in the new igloo as there was a rock that took up part of the floor space.
With only three sleeping in the ten footer, we had plenty of room. I slept in the single person's spot along the trench and the person in the new igloo had to crawl over me to get out when I was sleeping. He did it without waking me...
The fellas I was with wanted to build another igloo just to build an igloo. We didn't have quite enough room to build an eight foot between our first igloo and a huge boulder that sat there so I mentioned that I had built overlapping igloos before. They were all in the the learning.
Here's a picture from inside the bag in the second igloo looking into the ten footer:

This is looking across the ten footer and into the eight and it gives some idea of the layout in the main igloo:

You can see into the eight footer a bit more in this picture but his gear isn't all laid out for bed yet: