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Building a quinzee…

Wilderness survival manuals illustrate several types of snow shelters suggested for emergency use. Oddly, the simplest shelter with the broadest application is rarely suggested, it’s a snow-mound shelter called a quinzee. Building a quinzee requires little more than snow, a shovel or two and a few hours work. Quinzee’s are simple to construct compared with other wilderness shelters. A quinzee is a great choice for your first snow shelter construction and a great choice for an emergency shelter if there is enough dry snow to heap into a large mound. Quinzees are your low-impact choice, too. When your quinzee melts, it leaves no trace.

Like all snow shelters, quinzee construction requires a lot of hard work–more so if you have only one small collapsible emergency shovel. Dress in layers and keep a water bottle full and handy, drink it empty and refill it as needed. Have a change of clothes ready for your cool-down time. Wear a waterproof outer layer while digging out the inside of the quinzee –you will perspire.

Do this. #GoOutdoorsAndDoit. There’s no better snow adventure for teens than building a Q. Just be sure they get proper training and oversight, someone who knows this stuff.

I follow a few simple steps:

1) Stomp a perimeter circle in the snow. Make your quinzee’s perimeter circle at least outstretched arm’s length wider than the tallest occupant. The mound can be smaller if necessary for emergency use.

2) Excavate crusted snow and deep loose snow from inside the perimeter leaving a foot or more snow depth inside the perimeter. Compress the interior snow under foot and using shovels to prepare a strong wall foundation and smooth sleeping platform. If there is little snow to work with, scrape all the snow out of your circle. If the ground is not frozen, add snow to build a platform. Remember, snow is a better insulator than the ground.

3) Pile non-essential soft equipment in the center of your circle for burial. Protect your equipment, wrap sleeping bags and pads and the like in a tarp with margins bundled at top for easy opening as you excavate around it. Your equipment pile reduces the digging you will do to hollow out your quinzee.

4) Start shoveling. Heap thick crusted snow chunks loosely to cover over or to fill space around the equipment pile. Quality snow is not required for interior fill above platform level. Next, heap clean dry snow onto the growing mound.

5) Keep shoveling. Now, break-up crusty snow as you go–mix it up–make it granular, don’t pack it down, just pat it down. Granular and powdery snow is most important when adding the last foot and a half or so that will make up your quinzee walls after you dig out the center of the mound.

6) More shoveling – finish your mound by walking around it and throwing shovel loads of powdery snow onto concave areas until your mound is symmetrical and a little convex all around.

7) You are almost finished with the construction phase. Next, insert depth-gauges, thin twigs, twelve to eighteen inches long into your snow mound spaced 18” apart to indicate wall thickness as you dig out the center a few hours later. The lower third of the walls should be thick (14-18” gauges pushed all the way in), the upper two-thirds thinner, not thinner than 12 inches, as little as eight inches if the snow quality is excellent. When you expose the inside end of the twigs, your depth gauges tell you to stop digging before you dig through the wall. Another method, for patient and observant risk-takers is just digging blind in the dark interior until you see the soft glow of sunlight through the walls all around – good luck.

8) Now the most important step. Walk away from your mounded snow for a couple of hours or more to allow time for the mound to set-up. The grains of cold dry snow touching each other will sinter. They stick to each other forming a three-dimensional network.

9)  Excavate your quinzee slowly at first checking sintering. Cut a small entry, keep it small. If exterior walls crumble, walk away for another hour or two. If solid, dig out all of the interior snow you can reach from the outside then crawl part-way into the excavation and dig upward and to the sides, thinning the walls and roof around and over the doorway until you can sit up just inside the door to continue digging inward. Use a small shovel with a short handle inside the mound.

10) Keep excavating. Work your way toward the interior from above, downward keeping proper roof thickness overhead. Dig into the mound one shovel-blade length at a time, top to bottom. Avoid working under several feet of snow suspended overhead.

11) Use the buddy system. Whenever someone is excavating, someone stays outside watching, and clearing excavated snow away from the entry.

12) Finish your quinzee. Smooth the interior walls of the fully excavated mound with a mittened hand, smooth the entry floor and sleeping platform. Your finished quinzee will be roomy inside. Upper interior sides will be parallel to the external sides and eight to twelve inches thick. Lower walls will thicken to at least fourteen to eighteen inches at the base, widening inward and outward to form a strong foundation.

13) Punch a couple two-inch holes in the roof for ventilation, keep them open.

14) Cover the floor with a waterproof groundcloth and use thick ground insulation between the ground cloth and your sleeping bags.

15) Move in. Position sleeping bags away from the sides of the shelter to prevent wicking moisture from dripping walls into the bag during the night.

How does a snow pile form a strong shelter?

A fresh snow mound left for a time will set-up, a process called sintering. Sintering occurs as churned ice grains form new attachments wherever they touch. Points of contact form little ice-necks between the grains. Millions of tiny ice-necks connect millions of ice grains into a three-dimensional network. Ideally, sintering results in strong, durable, light-weight snow walls and roof.

Exactly how these little ice-necks form between grains is still actively debated among researchers. All agree the sintering process results from movement of water molecules to the contact points where congealing or refreezing water forms the little ice-necks. Sublimation, diffusion, water-like molecular flow across grain surfaces, capillary-scale water-films moving along grain surfaces, pressure-welding, and other materials processes are possible explanations. A snowflake changes through time from the moment it forms in a cloud to the last of its ice forms a droplet of water. Along the way it tends to form grains that grow larger until they melt or sublimate away.

The bottom line: Those little ice-necks form best between little grains of granular snow that you have churned, crumbled, and mixed, then piled up. Cold snow layers mixed with less cold snow layers causes a thermal gradient through the mound that helps energize the sintering process. The result: your light weight snow walls insulate and protect you from cold wind, and they capture your body heat, raising the temperature inside your shelter to near freezing even when it’s below zero outside. Stay warm during a winter wilderness emergency or just have fun building a quinzee. Go play in the snow #GoOutdoorAndDoit.

Pit-falls (pun intended):

Avoid excavating snow plow piles, they are likely to collapse because the snow is not uniform and does not sinter well. Layers of dirt, salty gravel, leaves, and other debris weaken walls, too. True emergency? The benefit must outweigh the risk. That’s a tough call.

Avoid digging deep into your snow mound before digging upward to thin overhead snow to a thickness of a foot or so. If you dig a large opening all around the inside of the mound while several feet of snow remains overhead, you may be risking collapse while you are inside.

Wet snow properties are counter-intuitive, wet snow packs into nice snowballs, big and small, so why not a snow shelter? Wet snow works very poorly, or not at all, for snow shelter roof construction. Snow that feels wet has liquid water surrounding ice grains. The liquid water lubricates motions between ice grains so they slip and rotate around each other, preventing sintering. Hard-packed wet snow will pack tight and hard but is very heavy and is not durable. You don’t want to be trapped, sleeping under a thick wet snow roof while it’s sagging and collapsing!

Tom Bain, Outdoor Readiness