A yurt trek turns zeroes into heroes
It seems that I can’t go a single day here without hearing how someone just shredded some gnar pow or dropped a sweet line or spent the day flibbety flabbing down a mountain somewhere. If none of what you just read makes any sense, I’ve got the perfect winter activity for you: yurt trek.
For those not in the know, a yurt is basically a glorified tent that (with any luck) you don’t have to set up yourself and is equipped with everything you need to enjoy a spartan weekend in the woods in the middle of winter: plank bed, wood stove, stump chair, camp stove, Scrabble.
If you’re in the area (i.e., in Idaho) then you’re probably within an hour or two of a yurt. Once I started investigating, I quickly found that they’re pretty ubiquitous around here, and most are open to the public, for fees which run the gamut (from Super 8 to Hilton). In the Stanley area, Sun Valley Trekking owns and operates the Bench Hut and Fishhook Yurt, both of which can be reached with a bit of effort from the Redfish Lake turnoff, on Highway 75.
But for our purposes (celebrating my husband’s 30-somethingth), we needed to get a little higher and deeper into the Sawtooths, and closer to the birthday lines he’d drop on his as-yet-untested back-country gear (See? I even picked up some of the lingo on the trip. You, too, can achieve fast results! Book your yurt today.) It also helps to have friends in high places––our old pal Trei used his connections to get us two nights in the Williams Yurt, owned and operated by Sawtooth Mountain Guides and located six long but worthwhile miles into the SNRA, at the base of Williams Peak.
The haul into a yurt can usually be made on either snowshoes or skis; generally the skiers use skins (sticky strips resembling brightly colored seal hide) affixed to the bottoms of their skis for grip. And take it from one who knows––from recent experience––snowshoes only go so far in really deep snow. Luckily the trail up to Williams Yurt is oft-traveled, so we didn’t have to do much slogging.
If you don’t worship at the altar of powder, your day in a yurt might break down something like this:
- Stoke fire, or complain until someone does.
- Burrow deeper into sleeping bag until you can no longer ignore your bladder.
- Visit “Pee Tree” and try not to pee on your slipper.
- Hop back into sleeping bag.
- Fetch buckets of snow to melt for water, or complain until someone does.
- Revisit sleeping bag.
- Pour now-melted snow into percolator for coffee.
- Wait for coffee (in or out of sleeping bag––your call).
- Drink 5-10 cups of coffee, or until warm.
- Cook meal, depending on time of day.
- Eat.
Most of the rest of the day consists of a repetition of one or all of the above.
Perhaps it sounds interminably boring, and if so, don’t go. No one’s holding a gun to your head.
But if you’re up for a place where the only interruption in the silence might be the occasional whoomph of snow falling from branches or settling on slopes; where there’s nothing more precious and miraculous than warm toes and fingers; where your yurt-mates become irritating siblings that you wouldn’t trade for anything; and where you’ll eat mountains of food that you actually need: go.
Just go.
Awesome Facebook group!