It snowed 30 inches (76 cm) in less than 12 hrs but I was comfy and warm in my dugout shelter (snow cave) under 10 feet (3 meters) of snow. I built a mass snow cave the size of a small cabin carved...
Transcript
As I cut away the sides, every so often the snow will settle and just go, whoo. It's a nice little noise and scares the bejeebies out of me. This is a pretty cozy little shelter. I'll tell you what, that is a beautiful view. I've got room to sit down, cook, sleep, this is perfect. And it only took me four hours to make this thing, which is a lot less time than some of my other snow shelters. Oh, this smells so good. a beautiful chicken mango curry. Mmm, that was good. That was good. Check for leaks and put the hot water bottle at my sleeping bag. Get all nice and toasty. I'll tell you what, this is just one of the best snow shelters I've ever made. There's a couple key features that are really important to keeping you warm. First off, you don't want your sleeping area to be the lowest point in the shelter. The cold air tends to collect at the bottom. Another thing is, you want to make sure your snow shelter has lots of corners. You don't want to allow the wind to blow straight into your snow shelter. Additionally, when you do have a corner, make a little extra room, so when the wind comes down, it goes past the door instead of being funneled into the door. Likewise, on this end, I've got two entrances so that if the wind blows crosswise, the wind continues through the shelter instead of getting funneled down into the shelter. But I'm going to get a chance to really test the shelter out. It's supposed to be a pretty good snowstorm tonight. We'll see what happens. Looks like I had some sit on my face. The snow here is really soft. Hopefully it'll freeze really good tonight. Then my stairs won't fall apart. The type and quality of the snow really affects how much energy it takes to build one of these shelters. This was really easy stuff to work with, so things went really fast. I moved a lot of snow in just four hours. The inside of this shelter is about five feet wide, and the roof is a little bit over six feet tall. So the very back of the shelter to the mouth is 11 feet. I had to move about 230 cubic feet of snow to excavate this part of the shelter. So at the bottom of the entrance to the top of the snow berm, it's a little over 10 feet deep. But the original surface of the snow was about 8, 8.8.5 feet deep. The distance from here at the top of the stairs to the back of that wall is about 17 feet. Plus there's this little bit I excavated right here. So my rough estimate is that I had to move about 423 cubic feet of snow to build this shelter. A little over 15.5 cubic yards. That's the max capacity of a commercial dump truck. I earned my hot chocolate tonight. Well, it is getting late and it's getting cold. Got some peanuts for a bedtime snack. Well, it's getting late, so I'm gonna go ahead and eat some peanuts and listen to an audiobook and go to bed. But tomorrow I'm gonna do something interesting. I'm gonna see what it takes to make this tunnel collapse. I know a lot of people have wondered whether or not these snow caves will fall down on you. And honestly, I don't know. We'll test that out tomorrow. Oh, good morning. I'm nice and warm. I gotta get up and make some breakfast. Oh, look at this. Got a lot of snow last night. Oh, yeah, that's got to be at least a foot. Consequently, the roof has sagged a little bit. It's about an inch or two shorter. I'm having to hunch over a lot more than I did last night. Snow caves will actually do that. They'll sag quite a bit over time. If you're gonna use them for more than one day, often you have to re-dig out the roof. If you're a bit claustrophobic, you can make it hard to sleep at night knowing that the roof is slowly sagging over your face. Alright, let's see if I'll get my pants on. Oh, my pants are frozen. steel cut oatmeal and slice spam for breakfast. Alright, this steel cut oatmeal is so good. Got some butter in there, brown sugar, raisins. A little hot spam to go with it. Mmm. It's not bad at all. Alright, well, I'm gonna clean this place up, and then we're gonna go explore outside. We got a lot of snow out there. Alright, let's go see what it's like outside. It's a proper little snowstorm up here. It is really snowing. All of this fresh snow is going to make the avalanche danger go through the roof. Luckily, we're not in any avalanche zone, so we'll be okay. Above the ceiling right here, the snow's pretty thick, but yesterday I could see light shining through in that corner of the cave, which means there's less than two feet of snow between the ceiling and the surface of the snow. You can kind of see what I mean right here. There's this blue color. That's light shining through the snow right here. You can see that's about two feet of snow. So I'm really curious to see whether this roof can stand up to 200 pounds of me jumping up and down on it. I couldn't feel any movement. Yeah, it looks perfectly fine from here. Well, this one hasn't collapsed yet, but all snow caves collapse eventually. Alright, I think it's time to get out of here. Oh, look how deep this snow is. Even with my snowshoes, it's going up to my kneecap. It's probably two and a half feet of fresh snow since yesterday. I got a sneaky suspicion that my car might be very stuck when I find it. I think I got some digging to do. Yeah, we got a good solid two feet of snow. I've got about 100 yards of unplowed road to go. That's gonna be tricky. We've got absolutely no visibility. Don't need visibility unless we can drive somewhere. Hey, not bad. I got like 75 feet with that. Let's dig it out and try it again. I want to take my snowshoes and beat a path to the piled road. Oh, that's a long way to go. I was giving it a bunch of throttle and it just popped on me, and I kind of smelled this burning smell. and now only two of the wheels are spinning. I think I buggered up the all-wheel drive. Got a gentleman in a big four-by -four pickup who might be able to help get me out. That's pretty sick. Oh, I'm about to go for a ride. Oh, we're doing it. That pickup truck was a monster. If it wasn't for that, I would have been here for a long time. Oh, it is nasty. Oh, the car is smoking. I'm so glad you're home and safe. I was worried about it. Yeah. Look at the car, it's smoking. Yeah. The car likes cleaner. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Oh, Betsy not good! Well guys, I've made it back safe and sound, and hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you want to see more outdoor adventures from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel, make sure to click subscribe and put out new videos every Saturday morning, and check out our playlist, including our winter camping and adventure playlist. 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