On December 5, I woke up, brushed my teeth, and jammed five crazy carpets into an already jam-packed pack-rat backpack; stuck woolly-socked feet in worn-out snowboots, and met the seven other members of Selkirk’s fledgling Outdoors Club in the parking lot of Kekuli House for an overnight trip on Ripple Ridge, near Creston.

We piled into a couple of beat-up sedans filled to the rafters with snowshoes, skis, supplies, poles, jackets, and sleeping bags and listened to music by the Bear Necessities and Fresh Prince all the way to Kootenay Pass.

In books I’ve read there have been snug little A-frames, chopped wood, and cozy corners atop snow-dusted mountains, but not in my real life that I’m living day to day.

On that day however, we pulled into the Creston/Salmo Summit brake check area, piled out of the two beat-up sedans, grabbed gear, strapped on snowshoes and telemark skis, and began the uphill leg of our journey to an A-frame “snug-as-any-book-concerned-with-cozy” might describe.

Out on the ridge at the 1952 metre mark, the club undertook the construction of a quinzee—a snow shelter—we hope to use for winter slumber parties in January. Though a quinzee as big as the one we had our hearts set on couldn’t comfortably be finished in two days, we managed to put quite a dent in the snowpack on the side of our chosen hill.

Unlike an igloo, which is built of cut snow blocks, a quinzee is made by hollowing out a large pile of settled snow and using the excess to construct a cool tunnel entrance.

We spent the afternoon, shovels in hand, moving great quantities of snow up and down and over our quinzee’s proposed location, with gusto, until the sun began to slip behind the hill and all our arms were creaking with the effort of a shovelful.

At home in our snug little cabin we brewed up pot after pot of tea, feasted on curry and homemade pitas, and played cards by candlelight. And after supper, stars studding the sky, we picked out Cassiopeia, untied the flying saucers, yanked the crazy carpets out of our bags, and spent a few hours screaming through the powder and the cold, wind whipping against our faces, snow creeping into boots and jacket sleeves and crystallizing in hair and eyelashes until we’d torn up the pristine hill and the moon began to rise.

Sleepy-limbed and cupcake-hungry, we dragged our carcasses back to the cabin for dessert and curled up like kittens in our sleeping bags, while Nigel stoked the crackling fire.

The Outdoors Club went to Kootenay Pass to build a quinzee that weekend. We had a killer good time.

For more information regarding the SCSU Outdoors Club, contact Jean-Frederic Mongrain at jf_mongrain@hotmail.com.