The quiet of a Quinzhee
Posted by Zach Johns on Thursday, February 14, 2013 Under: Winter camping
Halloween
1991. Yes, the day of the snowstorm to end all snowstorms. I was a
freshman at UMD when that record snow fell, and we reveled in it as only
college freshmen can.
Skiing behind the dorms. Jumping off the dining center. Snowball fights involving half the student body. We loved it. Soon after the blizzard it was time to choose our classes for winter quarter. As I paged-through the course catalog, my snow-crazed brain lit-up: Winter Outdoor Recreation! Yes, my first choice was not a class to fulfill my communication major, nor my journalism or history minors, nor even a liberal education requirement. Two credits which were in theory completely useless, but have proven to have made more of an impact in my quality of life than any other.
Sure, we did some cross country skiing and some snowshoeing. We even had a unit on rock climbing. But the main focus of Winter Outdoor Recreation was winter camping. In our camping unit we learned about proper clothing choices, how to prevent and deal with hypothermia and frostbite, proper eating habits in the cold, but the most fun part of all was building quinzhees!
Quinzhees are traditional Native American snow shelters which are surprisingly easy to build. You shovel a big pile of snow, let it harden for a while, then dig into it - hollowing it out into a shelter. That’s it! Of course, we learned some fancy tricks like piling the snow on top of your backpacks to save some digging, poking sticks into it so you know when to stop, sloping the entrance to capture heat, etc. But in it’s essence, all you do is burrow into the snow like you did as a kid.
And nobody in our class had more kid-like enthusiasm for quinzhee-building than the guy my friend Greg and I named “Captain Quinzhee!” When we practiced quinzhee building at the UMD campus the good captain was like a kid in a sand box, just digging and digging and digging some more. I swear, that kid single-handedly built a whole village of quinzhees behind the Sports and Health Center!
Of course, all of that training was just a build-up to the final exam of the class - an overnight quinzhee expedition out in the woods. Our class was divided into groups of four and we went to work preparing. My new friends Greg, Ron, Steve and I made a trip down to Duluth Surplus for polypropylene long underwear and wool pants. We traveled to Super One for high calorie food. We rented backpacks and snowshoes from the Outdoor Program. We were ready.
So was Mother Nature. The temperature for our campout: -30.
Needless to say, we spent most of our trip just trying to stay warm. We hiked around, searched for firewood, and had a snowshoe race, which I actually won. I guess that since I had snowshoed before, I was the only one who knew not to sprint and slowly overtook my classmates who landed face first in the snow.
We also kept warm by shoveling. A lot. One thing about quinzhee-building - you need a strong back and waterproof clothes. One must shovel for an eternity before piling enough snow to live in, and when you’re inside digging, you’re bound to get wet.
We shoveled and shoveled and shoveled until every flake of snow in our general vicinity was in our pile. As we were waiting for our snow to solidify, we heard a “whump.” I looked to the right and there was “Captain Quinzhee” sitting chest deep in a pile of snow. Apparently the captain was so eager to get to the “mole work” he neglected to let his pile sit long enough.
We were not going to make that mistake. So we snowshoed around some more to keep the blood pumping. After we deemed our pile solid we went to work hollowing it out. I’ve always found it easier to begin with your bare (gloved) hands, just punching and scraping at the snow and then sending it behind you to a partner who then shovels it out the entrance. Once you make enough space to move around you can use a shovel to scrape the walls and ceiling and then shoot the snow out, too. It’s sort of claustrophobic for a while, but one you get a big enough space, it’s not too bad!
At one point I was standing outside and “Captain Quinzhee” himself came strutting over and offered to check-out our work. He stuck his head inside for a while (his entire body minus the legs, actually) then came out, complimenting us on our progress. As soon as he left, Greg, who was digging inside, stuck his head out of the hole and sarcastically beamed, “That was Captain Quinzhee! He survived a cave-in!!!”
I laughed so hard tears froze to my cheeks!
Once the sun went down, the temperature really dropped. We retreated to the relative warmth of our quinzhee. As the four of us were getting situated, I discovered the most important rule to quinzhee-building. This is one I have ALWAYS remembered since.: make sure the ceiling is high enough so you can sit up in it with room to spare. Having your head scrape against the ceiling causing snow to fall into your sleeping bag is about the most miserable experience you can possibly have!
So the four of use snuggled deep into our -40 mummy bags, making sure to have peed several times before entering the quinzhee. Throughout the night we passed around a bag of bite-size Snickers which we had to suck on like Jolly Ranchers since they were frozen solid. We barely slept, passing the time until sunrise cursing our instructor Grant because he didn’t join us - just sent a couple of TA’s instead! The nerve!
I would learn later that Grant became the director of the Sir Edmund Hilary School of Outdoor Pursuits in New Zealand. So I guess he did know what he was doing!
Well, we survived the night and lived to tell about it. We even had bragging rights as the other half of the class went two weeks later (with Grant) and the temperature was +40!!! We out-wintered them by 70 degrees!
I also passed the class (with an A) and have used what I learned ever since. I try to camp in a quinzhee at least once a year. Sometimes I don’t due to lack of snow, but I try, and have had many memorable trips. I also never get cold anymore and I sleep like a baby!
Probably
my favorite post-college trip was with a group of co-workers to the
BWCA. We hiked in to Hegman Lake, and piled our snow at one of the
campsites. While it hardened we trekked over to the famous pictographs
and climbed a few steep rock islands. We then ate supper and dug our
quinzhee-out. As the main excavator, I was soaked by the time I was
done. Luckily, I packed extra clothes (as I learned in class) and
changed EVERYTHING under the cold night air.
Before we retired for the evening we all stood beneath the brightest, starriest sky any of us had ever seen. Then the wolves started howling. All around us their wild song rang across the lake, through the pines. It was magic. Then it was quiet.
We crawled into our cave. Silence.
If you ever want to “hear” true silence, go to one of the quietest places in the world, then sleep under a couple feet of snow. It’s so quiet your ears will ring.
The quiet of a quinzhee.
Skiing behind the dorms. Jumping off the dining center. Snowball fights involving half the student body. We loved it. Soon after the blizzard it was time to choose our classes for winter quarter. As I paged-through the course catalog, my snow-crazed brain lit-up: Winter Outdoor Recreation! Yes, my first choice was not a class to fulfill my communication major, nor my journalism or history minors, nor even a liberal education requirement. Two credits which were in theory completely useless, but have proven to have made more of an impact in my quality of life than any other.
Sure, we did some cross country skiing and some snowshoeing. We even had a unit on rock climbing. But the main focus of Winter Outdoor Recreation was winter camping. In our camping unit we learned about proper clothing choices, how to prevent and deal with hypothermia and frostbite, proper eating habits in the cold, but the most fun part of all was building quinzhees!
Quinzhees are traditional Native American snow shelters which are surprisingly easy to build. You shovel a big pile of snow, let it harden for a while, then dig into it - hollowing it out into a shelter. That’s it! Of course, we learned some fancy tricks like piling the snow on top of your backpacks to save some digging, poking sticks into it so you know when to stop, sloping the entrance to capture heat, etc. But in it’s essence, all you do is burrow into the snow like you did as a kid.
And nobody in our class had more kid-like enthusiasm for quinzhee-building than the guy my friend Greg and I named “Captain Quinzhee!” When we practiced quinzhee building at the UMD campus the good captain was like a kid in a sand box, just digging and digging and digging some more. I swear, that kid single-handedly built a whole village of quinzhees behind the Sports and Health Center!
Of course, all of that training was just a build-up to the final exam of the class - an overnight quinzhee expedition out in the woods. Our class was divided into groups of four and we went to work preparing. My new friends Greg, Ron, Steve and I made a trip down to Duluth Surplus for polypropylene long underwear and wool pants. We traveled to Super One for high calorie food. We rented backpacks and snowshoes from the Outdoor Program. We were ready.
So was Mother Nature. The temperature for our campout: -30.
Needless to say, we spent most of our trip just trying to stay warm. We hiked around, searched for firewood, and had a snowshoe race, which I actually won. I guess that since I had snowshoed before, I was the only one who knew not to sprint and slowly overtook my classmates who landed face first in the snow.
We also kept warm by shoveling. A lot. One thing about quinzhee-building - you need a strong back and waterproof clothes. One must shovel for an eternity before piling enough snow to live in, and when you’re inside digging, you’re bound to get wet.
We shoveled and shoveled and shoveled until every flake of snow in our general vicinity was in our pile. As we were waiting for our snow to solidify, we heard a “whump.” I looked to the right and there was “Captain Quinzhee” sitting chest deep in a pile of snow. Apparently the captain was so eager to get to the “mole work” he neglected to let his pile sit long enough.
We were not going to make that mistake. So we snowshoed around some more to keep the blood pumping. After we deemed our pile solid we went to work hollowing it out. I’ve always found it easier to begin with your bare (gloved) hands, just punching and scraping at the snow and then sending it behind you to a partner who then shovels it out the entrance. Once you make enough space to move around you can use a shovel to scrape the walls and ceiling and then shoot the snow out, too. It’s sort of claustrophobic for a while, but one you get a big enough space, it’s not too bad!
At one point I was standing outside and “Captain Quinzhee” himself came strutting over and offered to check-out our work. He stuck his head inside for a while (his entire body minus the legs, actually) then came out, complimenting us on our progress. As soon as he left, Greg, who was digging inside, stuck his head out of the hole and sarcastically beamed, “That was Captain Quinzhee! He survived a cave-in!!!”
I laughed so hard tears froze to my cheeks!
Once the sun went down, the temperature really dropped. We retreated to the relative warmth of our quinzhee. As the four of us were getting situated, I discovered the most important rule to quinzhee-building. This is one I have ALWAYS remembered since.: make sure the ceiling is high enough so you can sit up in it with room to spare. Having your head scrape against the ceiling causing snow to fall into your sleeping bag is about the most miserable experience you can possibly have!
So the four of use snuggled deep into our -40 mummy bags, making sure to have peed several times before entering the quinzhee. Throughout the night we passed around a bag of bite-size Snickers which we had to suck on like Jolly Ranchers since they were frozen solid. We barely slept, passing the time until sunrise cursing our instructor Grant because he didn’t join us - just sent a couple of TA’s instead! The nerve!
I would learn later that Grant became the director of the Sir Edmund Hilary School of Outdoor Pursuits in New Zealand. So I guess he did know what he was doing!
Well, we survived the night and lived to tell about it. We even had bragging rights as the other half of the class went two weeks later (with Grant) and the temperature was +40!!! We out-wintered them by 70 degrees!
I also passed the class (with an A) and have used what I learned ever since. I try to camp in a quinzhee at least once a year. Sometimes I don’t due to lack of snow, but I try, and have had many memorable trips. I also never get cold anymore and I sleep like a baby!
Before we retired for the evening we all stood beneath the brightest, starriest sky any of us had ever seen. Then the wolves started howling. All around us their wild song rang across the lake, through the pines. It was magic. Then it was quiet.
We crawled into our cave. Silence.
If you ever want to “hear” true silence, go to one of the quietest places in the world, then sleep under a couple feet of snow. It’s so quiet your ears will ring.
The quiet of a quinzhee.
In : Winter camping
Tags: quinzhee bwca umd winter camping minnesota snow cold iron range
Zach Johns is an alpine skier, backpacker, paddler and all-around nature lover who lives on Minnesota‘s Iron Range. Originally from Osceola, Wis., Johns attended the University of Minnesota-Duluth so he could ski every day and be close to the trails of his beloved North Shore. There, he earned a degree in Communication and was editor of the student newspaper. However, the real education he gained at UMD was in honing his outdoor skills. He took courses in subjects such as backpacking, winter camping, rock climbing and canoe tripping. By the time he graduated, that was all he wanted to do. In January of 1997, he moved to the Range where he met a group of die-hard skiers dedicated to making turns at Giants Ridge every single day of the winter (when they weren’t out skiing the big mountains of the west.) Throughout the late nineties he built a very impressive ski resume, taking several trips to Utah, Montana, Wyoming, California, British Columbia and Alaska. During the off-season, he took to the hiking trails. In 1997, he hiked the entire Superior Hiking Trail during the single season (what had been completed until that time) and in following years, took trips to Yosemite, Glacier and the Grand Canyon. He also made two attempts to climb King’s Peak, the highest mountain in Utah, but failed to summit both times. In 1999, he attempted the infamous 43-mile Kekekabic Trail through the heart of the BWCA and limped out after only ten miles with a hernia. He did finally complete the Kek in 2005, during one of the hottest weeks on record. Besides hiking, he also continued dabbling with paddling, making several canoe trips to the BWCA and became an enthusiastic (yet very novice) whitewater kayaker. He is now a father of two sons, Nick and Jackson, who accompany their father on nearly all his adventures. Both were skiing fairly soon after they could stand and from 2006-2011, the three hiked in every state park in Minnesota, 195 miles of hiking in 65 parks. Since becoming a dad, Johns has suddenly realized that you can’t just be out there skiing, hiking, paddling, etc. without also working to protect the very things you love. With that in mind, he founded an adventure club at work to get co-workers outside who might not otherwise be inspired to go. The club has gone on hiking, paddling, winter camping and cycling trips and annually go on a trash pick-up hike to celebrate Earth Day. He believes that once you get people out into beautiful wild places, the more likely they will be to protect them. He has also done a lot of volunteer work for the Superior Hiking Trail Association including adopting a backcountry campsite which he and the boys maintain twice a year. It is of extreme importance, he believes, to introduce children to the outdoors early. Not only is it good for them, but they will be the ones protecting these places once we are gone. Future plans? There are a few local goals to check-off including hiking the Border Route Trail in the BWCA and Isle Royale. Mostly, it’s just to take the boys hiking and camping in more of our national parks, skiing the big western mountains, and more of their usual seasonal cycle: Giants Ridge in the winter, Superior’s North Shore in the spring, South Shore in the summer and back to the North Shore in the fall.
