“The winters weren’t really conducive for building an igloo out on the lake, with it not being cold enough or having enough snow, either,” said Andrew Conley, whose day job is with the entrepreneurship nonprofit 100state.

The friends moved it to Monona Bay this year because most of the group live Downtown and the new location is easier to get to, said builder Nolan Johnson, who works at Epic Systems.

“Trying to get out in the middle of Lake Monona was ... about a 15-minute walk out there trudging through snow,” Johnson said.

On any given day, 10 to 15 builders assembled the igloo. In total, Johnson said, about 25 people “have gotten their hands wet out there.”

Phil Geiger, who also works at Epic, said they had to modify traditional igloo-building methods because Wisconsin doesn’t have Arctic permafrost.

“We did a lot of research into how the Inuit made igloos and promptly ignored all of that,” he said. “All of the hundreds of years of history. It doesn’t apply.”