Snow day memories

I have had many good memories in the snow filled winters of Canada but there is one that sticks out in my mind. I was about seven at our family’s cabin in Panorama and had just finished a long day of skiing, or at least what I called a long day back then, and my uncle asked if we wanted to build a snow castle. We started construction of this at around five o’clock in the evening and worked through to ten at night and it still was not complete so we decided to hose the bottom layer and make it freeze overnight. When we came back out in the morning the bottom was a smooth glossy sheet of glass but the upper layer had frozen strangely and had a sort of terrace to it. We decided to build a multi floored ice castle and it took us nearly the whole day to get the top right and sturdy enough to walk on. While my cousins and I were working on this with my uncle my dad and brother both carved a massive ice throne into the front and had also carved intricate details into the shimmering surface. We stood back to admire our handiwork in the light that only a sunset in winter can give of and agreed to sleep in our newly built addition to the cabin, we didn’t actually spend a whole night in it because it got cold. This is of course before I became the survivalist that I am. In the morning when we had to leave the cabin and head back to Calgary for school the next day we have our castle the send-off it deserved by packing holes inside with fireworks to weaken the whole thing and then cutting a long circle along the bottom with shovels before bringing them crashing down on top of the ceiling and leaving nothing but broken ice rubble. But although there are no physical remains of the castle I will always remember it.