Collection search - Building an Igloo. "The snow is very poor here, too soft on top and too hard at the bottom ... but it is the best we have found," Andy says. "We have to cut blocks 'on the horizontal,' out of the middle." He spirals the blocks around himself, like a snail building its shell, which rises higher and higher; it's like a winding little womb in the wilderness. As he adds blocks, they shield him more and more from the wind, which is now very strong and so paralyzingly cold that even short exposures are lethal to living tissue. "Left-handed people build igloos in a clockwise direction, and right-handed people go counterclockwise, but there are not many people who build them properly anymore," he says.