The Serious Business of Igloo Building
Attending the Northern Lifestyles and Winter Survival Course
Photos and text by Brendan Christopher Cathcart, Staff
“Go ahead and dig right in,” Rick said, referring to the serving bowl he had just filled with rib-like chunks of meat bathed in a reddish liquid, “it’s either seal, caribou or bison; I can’t remember which one.”
Though at home I wouldn’t normally eat meat, this weekend was about survival and adaptation to new environments, so I decided it would be foolish to refuse food being offered by the very people who were there to make sure I’d live safely through the next night out on the ice, so that I’d still have a body to eat another meal with the day after. I reached in and picked up a piece with two long, skinny cylindrical bones sticking out of the dark crimson flesh. The meat was very tender and similar to slow-roasted beef, yet had a thick, pronounced flavour of dull iron that I wasn’t used to.
“Hey, Rick,” I asked, pointing to the serving bowl, “What’s that liquid the meat is sitting in?”
“That’s blood.”
“Oh.” Well, I thought, that’s something I’ve never eaten before, but I guess when it comes to survival, food’s food.
Twenty minutes earlier, myself and 23 other people had just arrived out at the Delta Marsh Field Station, situated approximately 30 kilometres outside of Portage la Prairie on the southern shore of Lake Manitoba. Most came in small groups of two to three, but we were largely strangers that were there to participate in a winter survival workshop put on every year by Rick Riewe and Jill Oakes, an intrepid couple who are both professors at the University of Manitoba.
Far from being the weekend camping enthusiasts I imagined, Rick and Jill have spent a significant portion of their lives together living in some of the most inhospitable landscapes to be found on this earth: Greenland, Fenno-Scandinavia, Alaska, Siberia, Nunavut, Northwest Territories, northern Manitoba, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador, Queen Charlotte Islands, and Gulf Islands in Canada. The primary skill they were going to teach us, igloo building, is not simply a novelty trick they pull of in their backyard to impress their friends — it’s a precise and vital skill that has quite literally saved their lives.
Most of the people signed up for the course had some sort of personal experience or professional relation to camping in Canada’s four seasons. One woman worked with a medevac company, another made a pact with a friend to camp once every month of the year, a few were boreal ecology students, another was starting a company that does adventure tours, and there was a father-son duo that had already built three igloos and were looking to refine their skills. My two building partners, Patrick and Kristin, were ecology students who recognized that this particular skill might be necessary to acquire before embarking on fieldwork.
The first evening we spent getting introduced, eating mystery meat and crackers, and watching a slide presentation about temperature zones, igloo construction and the merits of various winter camping methods versus igloos. “You’re not expected to remember all of this,” Rick said, “It’s just to give you a bit of a framework for what you’ll be learning tomorrow.” Though we were still essentially a loose assortment of strangers, our mutual excitement for the subject — not to mention we’d just eaten blood together — began to ease us into a group.
Later that night I lay in bed reading through the small collection of articles Rick and Jill prepared for us as a sort of course packet. The first one was about freezing to death, or at least about falling into a state of profound hypothermia. Geez, I thought, that’s pretty dramatic. But as I read on, in another article about frostbite and hypothermia written by a doctor in Manitoba, I started to realize that until this point in my life I had just been lucky to never have encountered a situation where my toes would have to be amputated.
Dr. Roger Grimshaw explains in his article Maintaining 98.6 that a typical case would involve a person’s car breaking down or sliding off the road while driving in rural Manitoba. “Wearing clothing suitable for the city, he decides to walk to look for help. Within five minutes his feet are cold. Fifteen minutes later, he cannot feel his feet at all. After 45 minutes, he arrives at a farmhouse, his feet cold, insensitive to touch, and obviously frozen solid. He is suffering from deep frostbite, and will require intensive medical care and plastic surgery . . . he is probably going to lose some of his toes.”
In only 45 minutes? That’s a very short period of time for such serious damage to be done to the human body. After reading that, I remembered that two years ago my friend Jon and I got stuck on the side of the highway between Winnipeg and Winkler in -40 C conditions, luckily only having to stick out our thumbs for a few minutes before getting picked up by two guys in a very warm Dodge Ram. Bizarrely, when we asked where they were coming from, they said that they had left from Mexico early that morning. Because of the fortuitous pick-up, we never realized the potential danger we could have otherwise been in.
The next morning, after eating a protein- fat- and carbohydrate-heavy breakfast of pancakes and bacon, everybody bundled up and headed out on the snow-covered lake. It was a beautifully clear and sharply cold morning. Rick explained that the snow we were looking for had to be from one single drift, so that the blocks cut from it would have the same consistency. The drift had to be firm enough for us to walk on without making more than a slight impression in it with our heels. To get the job done right, only three tools were necessary: a pole with a rope attached to draw out a perfect baseline circle, a handsaw for cutting the blocks out of the drift, and a 14” knife with a top-heavy blade for trimming and shaping the blocks while setting them into place.
The learning curve for cutting adequate blocks was steep. We were organized into three people per group, each group needing approximately 50 blocks, all the same size and shape, to build a structurally sound igloo. A good half-hour in and most groups had produced only a small handful of useable specimens and heaps of busted and malformed ones. As with any skill worth learning, the perfect igloo — or even a functionally mediocre one — was somewhere off in the distance and would require practice and determination to get there.
The building process is simple yet complex. Each block gets set at a radial angle to the centre, spiralling upward at a slight angle. Every piece leans against every other piece in the dome, which is essentially a hemispherical arch that can withstand gale-force winds and support the weight of a polar bear that might climb on top to survey the land for its next meal.
To attempt a more detailed explanation of the construction would be to miss the point. The Inuit developed this architectural wonder through generations of practice, refinement and necessity, producing something by feel that modern architectural technology couldn’t improve upon if it wanted to. Reading about the finer points of igloo-building could not possibly prepare a person to build one for himself; it’s something that has to be done with your own hands before you can understand how the thing works.
Heading inside the lodge to take a break, warm up and eat lunch, everybody chatted enthusiastically about successes and failures so far. Busted and misshapen blocks were the most common experiences of the morning. Although we’d been given a demo complete with explanations, we were still essentially going along by feel, so it was nice to know we were all in it together. “If two experienced Inuit are working together,” said Rick, during the slide presentation on the first night, “they can build an igloo in an hour.” We were working together, but it still took most of us eight hours to build our igloos, an amount of time that might have taken our lives out in the wilderness. I had to change my wool mitts three times, because after a few hours they’d turn into an unusable 3 lb. version of Michael Jackson’s sparkling diamond glove.
When I asked about how important it was to fill in every crack in the igloo, Jill responded casually and without any special emphasis, “Well, it depends if you want to be warm, or if you mind being a little cold.” It didn’t occur to me at that moment that Jill’s perception of “a little cold” was something quite different than what I was accustomed to experiencing as a lifelong city-dweller.
Bernd Heinrich, naturalist and professor of biology at the University of Vermont, points out in his book Winter World that in the industrialized nations we have become “adapted to a tropical environment and maintain it around ourselves all year long, through our housing and our clothing . . . by the time the winter world descends, most of us have surrounded ourselves in an artificial tropics.”
Because we’ve adapted to living in an artificially warm environment, most people are loathe to go outside even on the warmest days of winter. As pathetic as it may seem, there are good reasons why people don’t dress adequately for the 10 minutes of horrible freezing at the bus stop. Travelling quickly from point to point in a vehicle precludes the necessity of owning adequate winter gear. In fact, proper winter gear becomes more of a nuisance than anything when you get on the bus and discover that you’re hotter than when wearing shorts outside in the summer. Could you really get away with arriving at school or at the office with sweaty armpits and dishevelled clothes, then pull of your wool socks and long johns and lay them across your desk to dry? Doubtful.
There’s no mystery as to why Manitoba’s great conversational obsession is the weather; it’s because it gets damn cold here in the winter and almost nobody is prepared for it even though it’s the same year after year. We’ve become conditioned to think that shivering is a terrible thing for a human being to be subjected to, while in reality it’s simply the body’s defense mechanism for warming itself by stimulating muscles involuntarily. I remember seeing Rick shivering during the first few minutes of being outside on Saturday, and naïvely, I felt bad for him. Really it was just my own tropical sensibility interpreting a natural phenomenon as a tragedy. Rick didn’t care; it was just a normal part of being outside. Through experience he had learned something that didn’t yet make sense to me; that being cold isn’t a sin, but being able to accept it is most certainly a virtue.
Back to the issue of filling in the cracks of the igloo, if it is done right, an igloo can provide an incredible amount of warmth, even in -40 C conditions. In his article “The ultimate guide to winter survival gear and the skills to live through the blizzard of ’82,” Rick explains about the structure’s insulative properties:
“The interior of a snow house is basically the same moist, silent subnivean (below the snow) microenvironment upon which all small mammals are so completely dependent for survival. If the supranivean environment is -40 C, the interior of a snow house will be at least 38 C warmer due to the heat, radiating from the earth, being trapped by the insulating snowcover . . . No matter how cold and windy it is outside, inside your well-sealed igloo will be calm and silent with a temperature hovering between 2 to 5 C, just from body heat and one or two candles. If a gas stove or lantern is in use, the temperature can rise to as much as 15 to 20 C.”
By the time we crawled in for the night, it was pitch dark outside. Patrick, Kristin and I were very excited to be sleeping in an igloo for the first time, one that we built together with our own hands. After about an hour, my excitement had turned into consistent shivering, and I discovering what Jill had meant by “a little cold.” Looking around to try to find the source of what felt like a reverse draft pulling the heat out of the top of my head, I saw that we had missed one crack. It was about a foot long, hidden underneath an overhanging block, six inches behind my head. I put up with it for another hour because I was too cold to move and I hoped nonsensically that the problem would fix itself. After it failed to do so, I finally moved to fill in the crack, which almost immediately changed the temperature inside the igloo.
To me and my bus-conditioned fortitude, it still felt unreasonably cold, but I think it had actually become what Jill had called “warm.” Patrick was doing much better than I was, so he offered to share some body heat. “If you’re cold, you can come right up next to me,” he said. Formalities and notions of personal space are moot issues when it comes to surviving together as a group, which was a sentiment my shivering body greatly appreciated.
The best part of the weekend was waking up on Sunday morning inside the translucent dome, knowing we had succeeded in an incredible feat made possible by the miraculous properties of snow. Also fantastic was realizing that I hadn’t frozen to death, lost any toes or fallen into profound hypothermia during the night. The igloo had done the same job for us as it has done for countless other travellers in far harsher climates.
For Rick and Jill, knowing how to properly build an igloo is the very reason that they were able to be with us on the weekend to teach us how to do the same. They told us a story about a time that they got caught in the middle of a severe blizzard out on the land in the Keewatin, a region of the Arctic. They were travelling by snowmobile with an Inuit fellow when, without warning, the conditions whipped up, becoming so intense that they couldn’t see their own hands in front of their faces. The only option available to them was to either build an igloo or to lie down and let the cold merciless fury of wind and snow transform them permanently into a part of the landscape.
Because they couldn’t see anything, they had to build blind, which would have been impossible if not for their extensive training constructing the shelters back home. The Inuit fellow complained about bad snow, but Rick and Jill just smiled and continued working. Prior to this they had built many igloos back in Manitoba, where the snow quality is significantly inferior to that found in the Arctic. Letting us in on the secret, Jill said, “If you can build one here, you can build one anywhere.”
After getting the igloo erected and properly sealed, they were stuck warmly and safely inside it for five days until the blizzard abated. Going into the igloo, Rick and Jill barely knew the guy they were with but, since necessity had driven them together, they made the best of it, passing the time by sharing stories and getting to know each other, which, they said, turned out to be a great time. Then when the blizzard lifted they crawled out and continued on their way. Learning how to build igloos last weekend ended up being more than simply acquiring an effective survival technique. It was also about learning to join together with total strangers for the purposes of adapting to difficult conditions and supporting one another through them. The weekend was fun as well as satisfying and it helped me to appreciate that there are more ways to live in the world than staying comfortably inside a controlled tropical environment. If you ever get stranded out on the highway, having the Northern Lifestyles and Winter Survival course tucked confidently into your utility belt just might save your life someday.
