Mount Royal’s igloo mystery unfolds

Last week, when I wrote about two mysterious igloos that were discovered on Mount Royal by a Journal de Montréal reporter, Stefan Ohrhallinger posted a comment claiming that he had created one of them. He also sent a note to the Journal, which promptly dispatched a reporter and a photographer to get the full scoop.

Turns out that Ohrhallinger, a doctoral student at Concordia, was inspired by a 1949 National Film Board documentary on the construction of an igloo, so he set out to Mount Royal to make one for himself. “I used a saw instead of a bone knife, and glued the blocks with wet snow when the weather permitted. As soon as the temperature drops below zero again and there is enough snow, I want to try again!” he writes on his blog.

Strictly speaking, what Ohrhallinger created isn’t an igloo, a fact not lost on several of our Inuit readers. But give the guy a break — it was his first time trying to make a snow shelter.

“It seems very hard in theory but after some unsuccessful tries it’s fascinating how well it works. [It] gives a good sense of achievement after 2-3 hours of work, and you see how your skills improve,” Ohrhallinger told me by email. “I had the vague idea to spend a night there to see how comfortable it is, but sadly the authorities are concerned with ‘illegalities.'”

The original Journal article included a quote from a Les Amis de la montagne spokesperson huffing that “une habitation de ce type est illégale,” which seems like an awfully narrow view of the whole issue. Mount Royal belongs to the people; I can’t think of a better or more creative wintertime way to engage with the mountain than to create an igloo.

If some adults don’t realize that, kids certainly do. “Passing children who perceived the igloo immediately tugged on their parents to let them go inside and play,” recalls Ohrhallinger. “I saw later that somebody had even made some window holes in one of the igloos. I think that children want and need to play to encounter different materials, explore what they can construct with their hands (and also destruction is an important part of this learning), they should not be forced into doing only activities with limited potential to explore, such as the ones advertised in the park.”