How to Build a Quinzee Snow Shelter

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When camping in the winter, building a quinzee shelter is an effective way to stay warm.

This article provides four useful steps on how to build a quinzee. The first step is making an eight-foot high mound of snow. Your snow shelter must be tall but it also needs to be wide enough that it can hold your team members once it’s hollowed out. The second step is shaping your quinzee into a dome and allowing it to harden before beginning to hollow out the snow pile. After letting the snow harden you can start to hollow out your snow shelter, but make sure your walls are one to two feet thick. The next step is to use extra snow to create an elevated bed area, which allows the cold air not to reach you when you are sleeping. The final step is changing your clothes after your quinzee is finished. Building a quinzee can be tough work, and can make you sweat. Changing into warm dry clothes afterwards can prevent hypothermia.

This article was very interesting to read, especially because we just started building our quinzees in class. This article made me think about the structure of my team’s quinzee and how we could improve the construction of it. By reading this article it improved my knowledge of snow shelters and gave me a better understanding of how to build one. This article has inspired me to build a warm and safe quinzee that can hold through the night. Now knowing these steps, I will provide the information to my quinzee building team, which can help on building a better shelter.

"How to Build a Quinzee Snow Shelter." Boys Life Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.