In January of 2018, Glenn Kadi and I made an Igloo. It was lots of fun, but we didn’t quite do it right. A few weekends later, Kadi and I went up to it to camp in it. Unfortunately, it had collapsed, and we had to sleep in her car.
Fast forward to December 2019, about 2 years later. There had been several large, early season snowstorms that had dumped a fair amount of snow on the highcountry, and the three of us decided to try again.
Cameron Pass is a favorite of ours, since it is out of the way from the crowds of Denver, and it has some nice places to camp. There are some fields south of the Zimmerman lake parking lot that have great views of South Diamond peak, so they provide great Igloo sites, and they’re not too far away from the parking lot.
The first day we arrived, we attempted to start using the Ice Box tool, which is an easy way to make an Igloo. Unfortunately, it seemed that the early season snow was too loose and dry, so we decided to pack out a large area that we could cut blocks from the next day. I didn’t take too many pictures, so here’s a nice one of the hike out:
We camped near the Zimmerman Lake parking lot, just inside the treeline.
We used Glenn’s canvas tent on top of some snow we stomped out (about 2-3′ on the ground at the time). We had a propane heater that we used, but we were sure it was very well ventilated.
After we had eaten dinner, Kadi and I took a drive down the road to the Nokhu Crags overlooks along highway 14. This is a 30 second exposure, really made the clouds look cool!
I think this is Red Mountain, looking to the East. The moon peeked through the clouds for just a few seconds for me to get this shot highlighting it!
The next morning we packed up camp pretty quick to get back to the Igloo site!
Kadi got to work cutting blocks out of our quarry with the machete, while Glenn placed them together with the double saw.
I got to move blocks up from the quarry to the igloo site. Lots of fun!
Unfortunately, the granular state of the shallow snow made for crumbling blocks, and after making it up 3 layers, the lower blocks couldn’t handle the weight of the upper layers.
We didn’t give up entirely though! Though the Igloo wasn’t going to work, we piled up as much snow as we could get into a giant mound. Sometime this winter we will go back and make a Quinzee, which is basically just a snow cave from snow that you pile yourself. It was probably 5′ off the snow base, so maybe 8′ off the ground when we were done. Someday we’ll be able to sleep up in the snow! That’s all for this post, thanks for reading!
cameronfedde 