Our family is always trying to find new and creative things to do, especially during the winter when the daylight hours are short and it’s extremely easy to be more sedentary than we should.
A few years ago, Laura’s brother Josh came up with a great idea. For our 3 family Christmas gathering, he proposed that we build an igloo – but not just any igloo, an igloo made out of ice blocks. We decided that sounded like fun, and we charged headlong into the project, and learned a lot. That first igloo turned into more of a snow fort as we severely underestimated how many ice blocks are needed to make an igloo! So, determined to get it right, the next year we made plans! The igloo you see above is the result.
We realized we were going to need a LOT of ice blocks to pull this off, and we didn’t want just clear boring ice blocks, we wanted colored ice blocks! We discovered that 1 gallon milk jugs filled about 1/2 way made a nice easy to stack block. The next question we needed answered was how many blocks would we need? We estimated about 350 blocks. That’s a lot of milk jugs! AND, we discovered there was no easy way to reuse the jugs. Our family committed to 175 blocks, and acquiring that many milk jugs was no small task. We put out word that we needed milk jugs and started gathering them from friends all over the area. As we received jugs, we would add several drops of food coloring, add water, and freeze them. One advantage to living in Alaska was that to freeze them solid we just needed to leave them outside overnight.
We spent weeks making the ice blocks. It was a time consuming process. Then the day came to start assembling the igloo. In addition to the blocks we had made, Josh and his wife had been making blocks, and my brother Jonathan and his family had been making blocks. We were prepared with over 350 blocks, PLENTY to build a small igloo – or so we thought. We laid out the base layer on the frozen lake ice near our house and started building. We used a “jet sled” as the container to mix our mortar of snow and water. The mortar mixture was placed between the blocks to freeze them into place. It took a LOT of mortar! We had several people constantly hauling snow and water and mixing the mortar.
As the igloo got taller, we realized we were using up our ice blocks at an amazing rate. We did not have as many blocks as we needed to build the traditional entrance we wanted or to go as high as we would have liked, but we were still pretty pleased with the project and we had a fun time doing it. When it was finished, the kids had a great time playing inside. At night, we placed a lantern inside and it looked incredible. Word got out about our little igloo, and people started asking to come look at it. To protect the privacy of our neighbors we didn’t give any directions to people as to how to see it. However, a local television news station heard about it and wanted to come out and film it. We did allow them to come out and film on the condition that they not name the lake and just give the name of our community. They agreed and we had fun hosting them as they filmed their segment.
One family member wanted this to be an annual event. However, several other family members were of the opinion that it was just too much work and would take too much time and energy to recreate every year. We haven’t built another since this one, and maybe we will, maybe we won’t. I’m just glad we did this once. It gave us a lot of fun memories and some pretty cool pictures.
