Advice from Steve:
We put a 160 lb pig in the ground for 15 hours. The fire made the pit and walls sufficiently hot to cook it. If we had built a fire on top of the fill dirt to heat it up before we put it in the pit we would have been fine. The key is to keep the fill dirt warm.
The dirt we dug out of the hole and were going to put back into the hole got covered with three inches of snow over night. The next day it melted and got the dirt pile all wet. Later in the afternoon another blizzard came up and put more show on top. The top 6 inches of dirt in the pile was pretty much frozen.
When we put it back in the hole we got lots of steam and I guess put the fire out (and it was a hot fire, much hotter than the fire we cooked the pig in my backyard with). When we dug the pig up, only the lower half (towards the coals) was cooked. The upper part was raw and a region in the middle was at the right temperature to grow bacteria. We separated the three phases and the lower part was pretty good. The middle part was reburied. The upper part was stuck in about 14 ovens to finish it.
As far as I can tell no one died.
Lynn Salmon <>{