Snow caving brings back great memories for me: trudging through a godforsaken ice-locked hinterland (I swear we took the back way to Narnia) at a tender stage of adolescence with the Boy Scouts, only to spend a night freezing my hind end off in a sorry excuse for a hole I’d clawed into the side of a snowdrift like some desperate rodent. To top it all off, my boots were frozen solid in the morning because I’d left them near my cave’s opening all night, so I had to spend the morning cloistered in shame while they thawed by the fire pit. Ah, snow caving…
Turns out, like most teenagers, I just didn’t know what I was doing. Snow caving, which is exactly what it sounds like—making a cave in a mound of snow to use as a shelter for winter camping—can actually be an enjoyable recreational activity for just about anybody who can wield a shovel.
My first mistake, says John D. Erickson, was digging into the first lump of snow I could find at the edge of the Boy Scouts’ campground; instead, the ex-Spokanite and snow caving guru of OutdoorsWithDave.com says I should have looked for a drift at least four feet high and 10 feet across. (The alternative method involves making a pile of snow big enough to sleep in, then waiting for it to settle so it regains the density of naturally packed snow, and then burrowing into it—all of which takes more time and energy than you’re bound to have on a subfreezing day in February.) Cliff Hodges, a snow caving guide in Santa Cruz, California, suggests waiting until the snowpack—the amount of snow that’s piled up in a given location that year—is at least six feet.
It’s crucial to make sure there’s nothing hidden within the drift you’re hollowing out. Otherwise you could spend hours unearthing a boulder instead of fashioning a humble abode. Hodges recommends using an avalanche probe—a collapsible metal pole used to find people buried beneath an avalanche—to test the depth of a drift and make sure it’s all snow. Tad McCrea, a UW student and frequent snow caver—he’s kind of a bizarre mixture of Ken Kesey and Bear Grylls—learned that one the hard way the last time he tried to build a cave at the Hyak Sno-Park near Snoqualmie Pass and hit a rock wall beneath the snow before he’d dug very far. Since it was already dark and he didn’t have time to look for a better spot, he was forced to dig straight down, along the slope of the wall, putting the chamber of his cave below the entrance and allowing any heat generated within to escape. He’s immortal, so it didn’t matter; but for you and me, a good cave design is key.
Published: February 2009
