WriterByNature.com

The Hawk Circle advertisement reads:

Two Feet of Fresh Snow
17 Degrees Below Zero
No Tent
No Electricity
No Problem.

The reason: a quinzee - an Inuit word for a snow shelter made from compressed snow, which is then hollowed out.

Hawk Circle has snow, which made the construction of this shelter possible. The area also has had an overnight air temperature of -9 degrees Farenheit. I can now add the quinzee to the list of wilderness survival shelters I have spent a surprisingly comfortable night sleeping in.

Unlike an igloo, which is made of blocks of snow, this shelter was relatively easy to build. My snowshoes make a reasonable substitute for a shovel and with the right amount of stomping and stirring, packed powder snow can be piled and pressed into a sturdy mound.

I might have saved myself a bit of work by piling the snow on top of my backpack, giving me an automatically hollowed out chamber. But I learned that after creating the structure, one way to figure out where and how to hollow it out is to poke it full of stalks of dried goldenrod. As I dug in, the goldenrod stalks served as a guide to keeping the hollowed out area from getting too big.

It looks like a snowy porcupine, but if I ever did find myself wandering around in winter without a backpack, at least I know how to dig this out so that I don’t collapse the walls and undo all my hard work.

This was just a test run. Next, I plan to work with my classmates to build a group shelter, which we will inhabit for four days. In the meantime, I have to re-learn firemaking with a bow drill, gather the dried nanny berries, wild grapes and rose hips still poking up through the snow, and steep yellow birch inner bark in water for tea. Beyond a lesson in wilderness skills, this will be a lesson in cooperation and group dynamics.

I’ve always fantasized about what it would be like to have lived 500 years ago. This is as close as I’m going to get to that experience.