Snort
The Snow Fort (Snort) was a large quinzhee (snow cave) built by Fia Marrison and their friends on the Noyes Circle in the winter of 2025-2026. It contained four chambers and an outdoor courtyard, with various connecting tunnels.
Building
The Snort went under many phases and changes.
Tools
The initial pile of snow for the Snort was shoveled with one plastic shovel that Fia and Asher went on the bus to buy at Addams on the first day that it snowed, and various large shovels borrowed from facilities. The first chamber of the Snort was tunneled out with gloved hands and a frying pan from Noyes. After the majority of the second chamber was built, the builders used a metal shovel and the ice pick from the Outing Club. After winter break, Fia brought two more small metal shovels and two big plastic ones. Later the builders also used a large plastic shovel (with a metal edge) from the outing club.
On December ???? and March ???? Grounds used some snow plows to give extra life to the Snort.
Time
According to Fia's spreadsheet schedule, they spent about 30 hours on the Snort in December, 65 hours in January, and 2 hours in March building the Snort.
Technique
For
Documentation
Media
The Snort was featured on Vassar's socials in a video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7NQtd_cEzvw
The Miscellany News made a video and published an article on the Snort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jDTelj1cio https://miscellanynews.org/2026/02/05/features/building-a-snow-fort-with-a-pan-a-cup-and-a-dream/
Notebook
Fia kept a notebook for the duration of the Snort. Here is a link to the notebook: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1j7c9dL2GSkMwLjVxsq7oWwgfXyc6uA2j
Community Engagement
Many people collaborated on building the Snort. Fia, Cormac, Quin, Etta, Sophia, and Reave were the main consistent builders. Other collaborators included: Xander, Melody, Asher, Valentin, Parker (as secretary), Rachel, Este, Mari, Ziva and others who just came for an hour or so.
Fia also collaborated with two members of the grounds team, Bernardo and Jaime, to plow snow to give the Snort some more life, and to make a small snow structure by the preschool Wimpfheimer.
Starting March ? there was a guestbook in the Snort that people could write notes in. It is also included in this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1j7c9dL2GSkMwLjVxsq7oWwgfXyc6uA2j
Artwork
Fia has made many theoretical and representative floor plans of the Snort, and has drawn sketches of the Snort in ballpoint pen. For their Color (Art 108) midterm they made three small chalk pastel drawings on black paper. As their Drawing 1 (Art 103) final they made four large chalk pastel drawings.
The Chalk pastels were all on 18x24 black construction paper. In Part 1, the sky can be seen through the melted ceiling, and the pile of snow from the courtyard can be seen through the old slide. A hole on the right reveals the shadowy first chamber, and trees beyond the original entrance. Part 2 is based on a photo from the second night where we crowded Reave, Fia, Melody, Quin and Sophia into the one chamber. Part 3 shows the view through the council chamber from the latest entrance into the courtyard. Above one of the council chairs, food coloring had been added by anonymous visitors as cave paintings. Part 4 is based on a photo taken by Asher and Valentin during the Snort picnic before winter break. Fia, Parker and Reave sit inside of the bench room on top of a plastic sheet and a picnic blanket, and Valentin's boot leans against the wall.
History
....
Current state
Fia collapsed the Snort over spring break, and the very final remnants melted on March 25th. Fia is currently doing an independent study on Snow Architecture, and they will continue to update this page and maybe post the link to a digital zine here if they make one.