Sweat Lodge Anthropology

“Okay guys, you're gonna be building a sweat lodge, and then you will build individual shelters for solos in the woods,” our counselor Lance explained.
In the middle of nowhere in the Colorado foothills, sixteen boys slouched in a loose circle around Lance, a Navajo who was around thirty with short mahogany hair framing a friendly face. The whole group resembled a multicultural patchwork quilt.
A Brazilian boy asked, “What’s a sweat lodge?”
“It’s like a sauna with ritualistic aspects. The Native Americans developed the ceremony to detoxify the poisoning effect of Western culture.”
I questioned, “What are we going to use to make it?”
Lance said, “Small Aspen trees are bent to make a dome shape. In the center, we will dig a hole where we will

I trekked among the stands of Douglas Firs decorated with furry needles and abundant spruce like cones. Hiking up, I had only the forest to keep me company. Scattered on the snow-moistened slopes and dotted along streams, the spruces were nearby, standing like lone sentries in 7000 feet elevation. The tapering Blue spruces are renowned for blue-green needles, which are lightly coated with a ghostly fine white powder. Finally, I claimed a spot under an enormous towering fir and started to build. Dragging and propping a humongous branch, I used that to create a central pole in what was to become the ceiling. Then, I gathered what felt like 100 three-inch diameter branches. Some of the branches were scrawnier than the giant ones, so I ripped bark from trees to help patch up the spaces. One time, as I was pulling off bark, an ant colony was disturbed. Suddenly ants burst out of small holes in the skinny tree and then retreated in mass confusion and hysteria carrying tiny eggs on their backs trying to escape. As a finishing touch on my shelter, I leaned needle-laden boughs all over the shelter to cover up the gaping holes that were asking for rain to get