We did our big igloo camp last weekend and we put multiple construction methods into practice (preliminary tests were in January).
I wasn't able to be there the first day, but the group built several quinzees and part of an igloo. The area had seen quite a bit of variation in temperatures and the snow was very sugary as a result and hardly wanted to stick together when they tried using the igloo kit. In fact, they found the blocks of the third row were collapsing in place and they gave up on the structure in favour of quinzees. However, the so leaders were too aggressive in hollowing theirs out and it collapsed on them before it was ready. one leader slept in the foundation of the igloo while the other crammed himself into his car for a poor night's sleep.
My arrival the following day with a fresh batch of blazer scouts renewed the group's waning enthusiasm for igloo-building. This corresponded nicely with some afternoon sun that made the top layer of snowy soft and sticky.
We managed to build the rest of the igloo In about 75 minutes, working with just two people for much of the time. We were almost incredulous that the device worked so well -- the snow seemed to defy gravity.
With the top closed off, our inside man had to dig his way out with a shovel. We found that there was about 6 feet from floor to ceiling in this igloo, which was 8 feet in diameter across the floor. There was enough space for about 6 or 7 people to sit comfortably in a circle along the inside walls, and the light from outside showed through the walls enough to light the interior reasonably well.
Although I was pretty jazzed to spend the night inside our new igloo, I gave up my place to the boys who had laboured to build the foundations the previous day. Since they didn't block off the entrance when they went to bed, they found it wasn't any warmer in there than it had been in their quinzee the night before. The big difference for them was how much space they had to move around without rubbing up against a wall of snow and ice.
Instead of sleeping in the igloo, I spent the night in this elegant quinzee, which we expropriated from two scouts. They were each a foot shorter than your average leader, so we spent a few minutes hollowing it out before we settled in. The evening temperature was about -4C when we went to bed at 10:30 pm, and my thermometer in the quinzee read about +6C or so, which is several tons better than the -20C that I experienced the previous year sleeping in a tent by myself. I had a thicker sleeping pad (with no leaks!) and a bivy sac. I found it so warm in there that I didn't have to zip up my mummy bag past my chest (the bivy sac kept things pretty airtight as it was.
The next day, we were able to get seven of us on top of the igloo before the roof collapsed.
We didn't try out the Eskimold blocks on this trip, since the snow had been poor and this method seemed obviously inferior to the Ice Box kit. However, on Saturday Scott and I gave it a try in the front yard, with snow that was bordering on slushy because of the warm weather.
The sticky snow produced results much better than we'd seen with the sugary snow earlier in January. Scott and I were able to build up a decent-sized wall in about 10 or 15 minutes. We couldn't really go any higher without an additional helper to keep it from, so we left it at 3 rows. Two days later the wall collapsed because of rapid melting. Scott was sad at first, but then I told him to run over and kick at the rubble and that made him happy again.
