Christmas Igloo - Part 1
Activity: Igloo BuildingDifficulty: Easy
Location: Peaceful Valley Campground
Description:
Our Christmas weekend started out with an optomistic adventure of building an igloo. We had been talking to the kids about building an igloo for several months and decided it would be good to choose a holiday, 3 day, weekend to locate snow and build.
Locate snow. That was our first task. Generally, we knew that over a certain elevation would have snow and we aimed for a plot of land in a National Forest. The early season was not very snowy and it was going to be a little harder to find somewhere close enough to home with pletiful snowfall. We drove up Left Hand Canyon, through Ward, and down Peak to Peak Highway. After a few failed attempts at locating a non-private land location we settled on Peaceful Valley Campground.
There is parking along the road, before the closure, and the campground is a short hike away. We picked out a site with deep drifts and flat land. We also wanted shade because the weather was in the mid 40's for Christmas Eve. We were ambitious but knew that building the igloo with two kids around would be a lot of work. We ate our picnic in the car and loaded up the sleds to start our build. We brought sleds because we wanted the kids to be able to play around in the snow while we built. Neil enjoyed "building" his own igloo, which mostly consisted of shoveling snow and throwing it in the air.
After a slow start, I ended up taking the kids on a short sled ride back and forth on the campground road. We ended our day with only about 1/3 of the igloo built. Not as quick as we thought it would be. But really, what is quick with toddlers? We ate our Christmas cookies in the unfinished igloo and hurried back to the truck when the warmth of the sun hid behind the mountains.
We would be back.
