Heat index

The picture at the right, below,

Igloo City, Cantwell, Alaska.
Courtesy of flickr;
originally uploaded by Mr. Lunatic Fringe.

an arty snap of an igloo-hotel-in progress near Cantwell, Alaska, made the rounds the other day (I first saw it on Coudal’s website).

Here, ff is providing a full-on collection of igloo links—not a lame one among them—to celebrate the onset of summer weather on the eastern seaboard.

• Arctic explorer Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson—the father of the low-carbohydrate diet—stands beside an igloo in a snowfield at Camp Hale, Colorado in 1947, where he is teaching classes in snow-craft (photo and annotation courtesy of the excellent collection in western history at the Denver Public Library, accessible through the Library of Congress’ American Memory).
• A hand-tinted photo of a man at the turn of the last century, dressed in his best clothes with a shovel in his hand, standing in front of a North Dakota snow-block-covered sod house, with a stovepipe showing.
  
• The Swedish Icehotel, a Lapp Brigadoon built from thousands of tons of snow and ice, has an inviting website with lots of pretty pictures. Maybe all of that vodka distracts one from the fact one is sleeping on ice.
• The “igloo church,” in Inuvik, NWT; the Our Lady of Victory Roman Catholic church is “One of thee [sic] most popular tourist attractions in Inuvik!”
• An collection of arctic exploration images from the 1850s through the 1920s, including stereoview cards, glass magic lantern slides, trading cards, and engravings from old newspapers such as the Illustrated London News and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Here’s a stereoscopic image of an Inuit igloo of driftwood and sod.
• Cheesy but pretty igloo photos from Japanese tours in Yellowknife, home of the 2008 Arctic Winter Games.
• An interesting account of a beautiful building, Seattle’s Igloo restaurant
  
  [inset, left], during WWII. An excerpt:

The neon eskimo hovering over the two metal domes of the drive-in invited passengers from a distance. Irene’s uniform, which included a short red skirt, red panties, white short-heeled boots, and white jacket, probably attracted more customers.

• A website and blog on the making of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, a new film by the makers of Atanarjuat, the fast runner, about a Danish explorer and scientist who visits the isolated camp of Aua, a great Iglulik shaman, in 1922.
• Arte Povera artist Mario Merz, fashioner of igloos.

Correction: I had originally cited BB as my initial sighting; changed it to Coudal, where I really saw it (sorry, Phil!). [cws::28 Jun]