Snow Cave Shelter

My initial plan for this blog was to build a shelter with branches, but it turned out that it was not easy to gather that many such materials. Instead, then, I turned to snow, which worked out perfectly.

I used only snow to build my shelter, but due to the loose texture of the snow and lack of materials and tools in the yard, a full-scale shelter was not possible. Thus I made a slightly scaled-down snow cave as a shelter, which can support about a child or half an adult. The tools I used includes shovels and a board.

With great help from my friend, I shoveled snow in the yard to pile them against a tree. But the texture of the snow was so loose that the snow could not hold in shape and I could not make the pile tall. To address this problem, I put the board in front of the pile of snow, which is in this way squeezed between the board and the tree. Therefore, making the snow pile tall became easy. 

By moving the board around in all three directions and shovel to add snow to the pile (the fourth direction has the tree), I eventually finished piling enough snow.

After that, I used a shovel to dig a hole on the front side of the pile so that it became a shelter.

The shelter is big enough to hold a child, but it might be difficult for an adult to squeeze in. It fits the requirements for a comfortable environment, since:

(1) Though it is made of snow, the material does not really matter. As long as it keeps people in a confined and protected space it should enable people to keep warm. Besides, people feel extremely cold usually because of wind. Since the shelter blocks wind, it makes people feel warmer. 

(2) In winter snow does not melt so it makes the environment dry, which is important for a comfortable shelter.