Last month, when the temperatures dipped well into the negative degrees Fahrenheit, I thought, “I’m so glad I just moved out of the yurt!” Last week, as I dug my car out of a foot of snow to get to work, I thought, “I’m so glad I moved out of the yurt!” And yesterday at 3:36 AM, as I was awakened by Chinook winds gusting up to 87 mph, I thought, “I’m so glad I moved out of the yurt!”
Around Denver, our weather is quite mild, considering the altitude and latitude. It’s sunny more often than not, and it occasionally dumps six inches of snow or more but usually just one or two. In the summer, it rarely gets over 98° F and if so, only for a few days. Mid-80’s is more typical. The wind is hardly ever as bad as in Wyoming, our neighbors to the north.
It’s easy, then, to do something like move into a tent in a guy’s backyard with no running water and forget about the weather. But then, you get home to 115° F indoors in August… or you wake up to 40° F indoors in October, and suddenly, weather is all you think about. Waking up to 87 mph wind raging outside a house with a foundation, solid walls and double pane windows is shocking enough – I can’t imagine what I’d do if I was still in the yurt, with canvas around a light lattice wood and zipper screen windows. I can imagine the yurt’s new resident, if there is one, is thinking right now, “Why did I move into a tent in some guy’s backyard?!”
Plenty of yurt companies have done tests and claim that I shouldn’t worry about my yurt-resident successor. Pacific Yurts, the brand in which I lived but in a standard size model, says their largest model can withstand up to 142 mph winds. They also offer a Snow and Wind kit, which unfortunately, my rented home did not have. Yurts of Hawaii similarly states that their products have been proven in hurricane force winds up to 120 mph. Colorado Yurt Company, based in my hometown of Montrose, has a specific Big Bad Wind Kit which protects the yurt up to 90 mph in open spaces and higher winds in protected spaces.
Thinking of where yurts came from (the steppes of Mongolia, where they are actually called gers), I think that I should have been tougher. After all, Mongolia’s Ulann Batar is the world’s coldest capital. According to weatheronline.uk, “winter nights of -40°C (-40°F) are common most years. Summer extremes reach as high as +40°C (104°F) n the Gobi Desert and +33°C (91°F) in the capital.” Okay, so the Mongols are tough, but we already knew that.
My boss is tough too, and I don’t think he’d appreciate it if I called in sick for work because my home blew away! Mongolian gers are oriented a certain way, to the south, so that the wind will not enter. My yurt was oriented to the place where it made sense to have the front door within the context of living in a yard, but that was to the northeast. According to this study of language at Macalaster College, “Mongols try to avoid any action that may encourage an increase in the wind, like whistling outside.”
I wonder if my yurt neighbors would have complied with a “no whistling zone.”
Living in a yurt was an experience I’ll never forget nor regret, but there were a lot of shakes, rattles and rolls when it came to tough weather. At 3:30 AM with January’s 80-90 mph winds raging, I am whistling a much happier tune surrounded by shakes, shingles and drywall. -T
The prayer flags came with (and stayed with) the yurt. Interesting, prayer flag literally means wind horse. I sense a theme here.
P.S. Did your mind go somewhere else when you read the title of this post? Check back soon for Chi-Nooky: Yurt Life and Lovin’
WRITING/NOT SLEEPING SOUNDTRACK
“Against the Wind” by Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band
“There in the darkness with the radio playing low
And the secrets that we shared
The mountains that we moved
Caught like a wildfire out of control
‘Til there was nothing left to burn and nothing left to prove
And I remember what she said to me
How she swore that it never would end
I remember how she held me oh so tight
Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then
Against the wind”
Your voice matters!