Winter Camping Specialization

I choose to specialize in winter camping this semester which meant for days in a quinzhee and lots of exploring around the area. Over night isnt tooo hard because you know that the next day you get to go back and dry out your clothes and everything so no big deal. But 4 days is another story.
The snowing tradition continued for the whole four days. We built this quinzhee the night before and woke up to about a foot of new snow everywhere ( dont leave anything flat on the ground or youll never find it). To our surprise we did not only have a ton of snow but also hurricane..well okay more like intense blizzard force winds non stop. I was sitting up and putting on my shoes in the morning and snow was blowing into quinzhee from outside! Trying to cook breakfast in this weather was ridiculously hard it it became apparent that our ridiculous idea of building a ginaormous quinzhee big enough to walk into and fit an indoor kitchen was well worth a try.
And we did it! A full day of shoveling later and it was complete. Pictures will never do it justice but you can get an idea. This shows about half of it with a circular center counter. A walkway that two people could pass through, and bench seats that linned the walls and could comfortably fit 15 people even though we didnt have that many. You could almost stand straight up when walking in the door and I could stand all the way up on top of the counter and not hit my head on the roof it was so high up.
This is entire group on top of it. It was so big we had to huck snow up as high as we could and then there was someone on top that picked up that snow and brought it to the top of the hill. It was totally worth it though. It provided an amazing place to hang out, cook, and talk. Over the four days we talked alot about investing into other peoples lifes and asking questions. Overall just purposefully making it a practice to talk about eternal things that matter. How often does that happen even hangin out with all your Christian friends?
It was an awesome four days. Being out there we soon realized that it was also hard to do something else in that terrible weather. So we built an indoor toilet. We built a miniature quinzhee and used the toilet seat that we had strapped to out backpack and put it in there. Then we used a ski pole a sppon and our hands to dig out a deep and narrow hole. It worked beautifully. We also got to do some backcountry snowboarding, a night hike with snowshoes under the stars and lots of other fun in the snow stuff.