A. It depended on several things; the size of the plans, the amount of help available, the weather conditions, and other variables such as the health of myself and any helpers. I built some of the first forts by myself in 3 days or less (with less-than-spectacular results), while some of the largest team projects took almost a month to build. Nomatter which way you slice it, building one of these forts was very hard work, and required a lot of time, effort, and dedication.
Q. How did you make the blocks when the snow wasn't packy?
A. This is perhaps the most common question I'm asked, and the answer is this: even if the snow does not pack well at first, a block left to sit 15-30 minutes will become very sturdy and easy to handle. Why? Because when you pack the soft, sugary snow into a pail, the friction heats it up just a bit. After the block sits for a while, it cools back down and the snow sticks together much better. This technique was fundamental to nearly all of the forts we built; the weather here is very cold, and soft packy snow is very seldom seen in mid-winter. If the weather is near the freezing mark, such blocks may have to sit for an hour or more, before they're sturdy enough to handle.
Q. How did you make upper floors?
A. This is something I've never discussed in detail, on any of my sites. The reason is because it was very tricky, very dangerous, and very hard to describe. It basically involved several thick boards for support, some pieces of plywood (or anything I find laying around) for filler, and 6-10 inches of snow and water for the surface. Any mistakes, and someone could get seriously hurt, which is why I don't recommend trying this yourself. If you try it anyway, you do so at your own risk.
Q. How do you make stairs?
A. This is a bit easier. There are two ways: (1) a "ladder" of boards (one built into each row of blocks), or (2) a real staircase made of snow blocks. The second method is more time-consuming, but looks nicer. Most of our forts have used ladders, a few have used stairs (#12 and 15), and others have used both (#18 and 21). Some of them weren't too sturdy though - be careful if you anything like this.
Q. What about windows and doors?
A. To make a window, you leave a gap in a row of blocks, bridge it with a wide board, and keep adding more rows. Making a door requires leaving a larger gap on the bottom two rows, which is rather tricky. A simpler, and perhaps more masculine, approach is to simply build a solid wall and smash or cut holes in it. Just be careful bring the whole fort down on top of you......
Q. Whatever happend to the snowfort video?
A. I started working on a snowfort video in 2004, hoping to finish and market it. But I ran into some technical problems, and I eventually just set the project aside. To make matters worse, the hard drive storing the data files eventually crashed (never buy a Maxtor!), and I was left with nothing. I still however have all of the original videotapes and photos, as well as a low-quality copy of one completed segment of the video, which I will soon be making available.
Q. Will there ever be a snowfort video?
A. Not likely. There just isn't enough interest anymore, nor do I have time or energy to put into it.
Q. Why do you call this the Snowfortzone "Jr."?
A. That's because I used to have a bigger version of this site, with it's own domain name. That was when the forts were at the peak of their popularity, and eventually people got bored and site traffic dropped to almost nothing. I couldn't justify the $25 a month it was costing to keep the site, so I eventually shut it down and made this one instead.
Q. How did you get the idea to build forts out of blocks in the first place?
A. It started one night in January 1997, after I had made a pile of (small) blocks to use in a snowball fight with my brother. The snowball fight never happened, and instead of just smashing the blocks, I tried stacking them into a pile. When I saw how well they stacked together, I started getting some bigger ideas. I built the first fort the next day, and in the past 8 years, the designs and methods have evolved greatly.
Q. When did you find enough time to work on these forts? Didn't you have a job?
A. When you run your own little electronics repair shop out in the country, in an age when most people just buy new junk at Wal-mart, free time is not hard to find.
Q. Why won't there be any more forts?
A. To make a long story short, there's nobody left to help me, and I just don't have the energy anymore. Even if the weather is favorable, it just isn't worth spending weeks of time on something that will probably just melt before it gets finished. I don't exactly have much better things to do, but anything is better than working for nothing.
Q. How old are you, anyway?
A. I was 17 when I built the first fort. Since I won't be updating this site any further, you can just do the match to figure out how old I probably am now.
Q. Are you single?
A. I'd rather not answer that.
Q. Don't you have a life?
A. No.
Q. Do you know you talk too much?
A. Yes.
Q. Why am I still reading this?
A. I don't know.