Sleepin' in a scout pit

I attended the Rabbitstick Rendezvous this Sept. in Rexburg, Idaho. While there I participated in a shelter building workshop with a really cool dude named Tom Elpel. He writes some great books about wilderness skills including "Participating in Nature" and "Botany in a Day". In the workshop we built a scout pit shelter. Its basically a shallow grave dug out with sticks. A fire is burned in the pit to dry it out and heat up the ground, then the coals covered with a few inches of dirt. After this we built a roof from sticks, covered the sticks with clumps of grass, and then pulled the dirt over the grass. This creates a roof that is water and air proof and almost invisible. Although, we decided to cover the roof with a log baracade because there were moose in the area and I didn't want one to step on me in the middle of the night! We pushed some dry grass inside to pad the ground with and made a clump of grass to plug the doorway with. I volunteered to sleep in this thing instead of my tent. That night it rained pretty heavily and was probably in the low 40s. I slept without even a blanket in just a t-shirt and long underwear and was so toasty warm that I had to leave the door unplugged. In the morning when I crawled out the earth was still warm and dry beneath me from the coals. When I got back to my crappy, old tent I discovered that it totally leaked and my sleeping bag lay in a big puddle. I was glad to have spent the night in the pit shelter! Try it sometime if you're not too claustrophobic (or however you spell that).