Amid a blizzard of activity, an old-fashioned igloo-raising

Ryan and Matt Rice have a thing for igloos.

The brothers, ages 24 and 21, are part-time college students living at home with their parents in suburban Springfield, Va. Every winter, if conditions are right, they build an igloo.

So when snow started flying last week, they grabbed shovels and started piling it up in the front yard of their brick colonial. They took snow from their driveway, from neighbors’ driveways, from front yards and sidewalks.

They piled it, stomped it and piled it some more until the mound was a good 15 feet high. It got so high, their mother, Shannon, implored them to quit before they got hurt.

Ryan lovingly yelled back: “Mom, go back inside. We’re two grown men building an igloo.”

The pair have been building igloos since Ryan was in third grade or thereabouts. Most of their ice houses have been puny mounds with a carved-out crawl space. This one is a whopper.

Head clearance is well over six feet. They had a party when they finished the thing, hauled in six or eight lawn chairs and some beer and lighted candles.

“We do it every year,” said Ryan, “but usually it is so small that you have to crawl in the opening. We’ve never had one before where you can wear regular clothes and not get wet.”

They shoveled for 10 hours before they figured the mound was big enough and packed down sufficiently to start hollowing out. They hauled snow out in a plastic recycling bin, using it as a mold to make snow blocks.

Neighborhood children flocked to their yard, helping out. Friends came over, too.

Matt figures they used about 2,000 shovelfuls of snow.

When did they know they were finished? “When our backs hurt so much we couldn’t shovel anymore,” Ryan said.