Building a wikiup is no small task. Pictured is a wikiup that I built with the assistance of two other people. The three of us took several hours to build this using nothing but the natural resources of the local area.
This Wikiup comfortably slept two people. Originally it had a fire pit on the inside as well, but the wood in the area was so saturated that building and maintaining a small fire was almost impossible. Instead we opted to build a large fire outside and just use a few hot rocks when it came time to sleep.
We built this Wikiup using several 10 foot long poles. These poles were scavenged from dead wood in the area. Once we built the frame with the poles, we filled in the outside using green bow branches. The bow branch portion of the project was honestly the most time consuming portion of it. It takes a lot of bow branches to effectively shelter the entire Wikiup.
When it was finally complete, it served as a nice shelter against the elements. It wasn’t the warmest shelter in the world but it did protect us from the snow storm and it was much warmer than the sheet of plastic that I had slept under the night before.
-NWW 1/25/2010
NorthwestWilderness Blog 
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