Built to melt: Boys’ impromptu South Hill igloo hearkens back to the days before cellphones

Bucket by bucket, the plan came together.

Jahir Turnbull, 14, had suggested on a whim that they build an igloo to bide the six teen boys’ time while they waited to watch the 2018 comedy action flick “Tag.”

It’s not that the movie, which centers on a group of friends playing an annual high -stakes game of tag, has any igloos in it. But it was snowing, and Jahir “just thought of it in my brain,” he said.

When the Inuit build a snow house, they typically make it with blocks cut from deep, compact snow with footlong snow knives. Spokane may have recently seen its most significant snowfall of the season, but the Grand Boulevard boys didn’t have that kind of snow (or knives) to work with, so they packed what they could gather from the lawn of Kade and Kobe Simmons, 15 and 13, into 5-gallon buckets and pressed it themselves.

Snow buildings are deeply practical for people who have traditionally lived above the Arctic Circle, where some of the smaller versions can be thrown together by practiced hands in just a couple hours.

The boys, on the other hand, had never built an igloo before in their lives, or much of any structure for that matter, unless “you count, like, a blanket or a couch fort,” said Xeke Zaman, 13.

Without a blueprint or firm plan, they got to work. They tried stacking the cylinders of snow into a rectangular footprint, before Kade and Kobe father, Dale, recommended they stick to tradition and make it circular. After a couple of adjustments to the original layout, the boys were faced with either a problem or a golden opportunity, depending on one’s perspective: the igloo was going to be, really, quite large.

Over the course of three days, with Dale playing foreman and Kobe spinning tunes as the group DJ, the crew got to work.

“I own a business, so keeping people busy in a good order is sometimes a challenge, but these guys could learn something,” Dale said. “We talked about bottlenecks for companies, and where we were wasting energy.”

When the boys started “harvesting” snow from their neighbors’ lawns, they made a bucket brigade assembly line, packing and passing building material by the bucket. After the first couple of layers, when they had to start working the walls inward, one would stand on either side to keep the walls stable while they slapped and punched loose snow into place like mortar between the bricks.

There were times that the monumental task weighed on their morale, but “we were in too deep,” Dale said, and, luckily, “my wife made us some food.”

Dale was happy to encourage the surprisingly large construction project that spawned on his front lawn, he said in an interview.

“We always talk about screen time, and everybody’s always on their phone,” he said. “But … when I was a kid, I was always outside, and I probably built at least four, like, legit tree forts in my childhood, and I would also be at Finch Arboretum building little dams in the creek, just random things outside.”

There’s not much left to be done, except to maybe try to smooth down the interior to remove the innumerable knuckle prints left in the snow, suggested Max Moore, 13, or to paint “hieroglyphics” on the inner walls, Xeke chimed in, possibly with food coloring, Kade recommends.

With temperatures slowly climbing and rain likely this weekend, the boys’ work may be gone sooner than later. It was the last makeup day before school starts back up when the crew met with The Spokesman-Review.

But with the time they have left with their creation, which can fit all of them easily, they make plans to light a fire in the center – the roof was never fully sealed, forming a chimney – and make s’mores.