FAQ - Igloos

Send any comments to the maintainer Roger Caffin

Igloos

You can try to build an igloo by making a huge mound of snow and then tunneling into it, but that seems like an unbelievable amount of work unless you have a spare bulldozer in your pack. Making an igloo really requires blocks of snow, piled up in a wall. Now I gather this is more complex than it sounds as the blocks have to have some strength, and shaping them is very hard unless you cut them out of hard snow/ice, eskimo style, or have a special block-making tool. And from America we have just such a tool, as invented and enthusiastically promoted by that American igloo-making expert and vendor of igloo-making tools Ed Huesers, to whom thanks for the igloo picture on the Shelter page.

Ed has invented a special "igloo block making and stacking tool" which he calls an Ice Tool. Basically it is a four-sided box on an extending pole. You anchor the end of the pole in the middle of your hut circle (sorry, igloo circle, not that primitive really) and start making blocks. You pack snow into the top of the box until it is full, open the box to release the block, move the box around to the next position, and repeat. As you do a full circle you are meant to be spiralling upwards. As the wall spirals up further you alter the length of the pole (still anchored top the ground in the middle) to get the correct arch. There's a whole lot more to it, explained in a tutorial video shipped with the Ice Tool, and which Ed says must be studied first. Well, that's the theory, but the author admits he has never seen it done. However, it was done at Perisher once (search on Google), and the builders slept several nights in the igloo. Photos and more info about this would be nice someone?

Ed (the guy in the picture) has spent years promoting the Ice Tool in America, and is trying to promote it in Australia. It would probably help if he sent some mountains and lots of snow with it: the pictures on this page were taken only a few hours from his place. Sigh.

In addition to these pictures, there are some good pictures of his igloos at altitudes up to 14,000' on Denali on his web site. Double sigh. There is also a lengthy manual on his website on how to use his IceTool to build an igloo, with lots of pictures.