Two weeks before the Christmas weekend, five of us — four adults and one 5.5-year-old — hiked in to a backcountry yurt for a two-night stay. I figured it was worth a trip report.
We drove two hours or so up from Boise on a Friday, getting to the trail system trailhead just after 1 p.m. The Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation operates six yurts off Highway 21 in the region. We geared up and set off on a 3.2-mile hike up to the Skyline yurt. The two guys (the reindeer) hauled homemade gear sleds, while the two gals (the elves) did their best to keep the child motivated (treats!) and moving in the right direction.
We all wore snowshoes, and you can see in the preceding photo that we were hiking on a groomed trail. This particular trail is groomed twice a week and had likely been groomed that morning. Trail etiquette required us to walk on the opposite side of the path from the set ski tracks seen on the left side of the path in the photo.
The yurt is situated at the top of a little pass that the loop trail travels over. While it definitely took some effort on everyone’s part, we made decent time and were up at our destination in about two hours. We set about lighting the wood-burning stove, as temperatures were expected to drop into single digits (F) that night. That and all the unpacking of “stuff”, took some time.
Those low temps made trips to the outdoor outhouse an exercise in cold management. It did have nice views, though.
The living up there is fairly rustic. We melted snow for drinking, cooking, and washing water. We packed in all our food, sleeping gear, propane for the cook stove, and maybe a diverse selection of alcohol. Plus with a child, there were some toys and art projects. But the yurts are very well stocked with other essentials: cookware, firewood, bunks with mattresses, a central table with chairs, and the afore-mentioned wood-burning stove.
(I failed to get a good photo of the yurt interior — not easy in a cylindrical space. But there are some good photos of the setup at this expansive site.)
Once we set up house, it was time to relax for a bit before starting dinner. Everyone in the group is a reader, so it was nice to hunker down in a warm shelter and delve into whatever books we had brought with us.
If you’re familiar with car camping, you would recognize the cooking going on in the yurt. The cook stove is a propane-powered two-burner affair, so meals tend to be one- or two-pot meals. Given the effort it took to get there, nobody was terribly interested in staying up late. We turned in by 10 p.m., with one of us rising occasionally to make an outhouse run or stoke the dying wood-stove fire.
Our Saturday was comprised of bouts of outdoor activity with warming back up inside. We were able to strip our gear sleds down so that we could enjoy some sledding, and everyone also did some snowshoeing throughout the day. I don’t think it got above the mid-20s, but the sun was out for a good part of the day, so we were able to enjoy our full day there.
Another comfortable night Saturday, despite more cold temperatures. On Sunday morning, we got up at a leisurely pace, made breakfast, and then set about to packing up and cleaning up the yurt. The IDPR asks you to really pay attention to cleaning and restocking (firewood) the yurt, as there is no way someone from the state can come up after each visit to each yurt to do that kind of stuff. So it takes time, but it is so worth it.
With all our ducks in a row, we gear up again and head out. The part of the loop that we’re taking out is shorter but steeper. Again, the weather cooperates, and in less than an hour-and-a-half, we are back at the car, making our way to the small one-time mining town of Idaho City to enjoy a hot lunch before getting back to Boise mid-afternoon.
Obviously, if you have an opportunity to do something like this, I would endorse it heartily. It’s a great way to get out of the house in even the coldest days of winter.
Oh wow!
Looks awesome, thanks for sharing.
Thank you, my pleasure.
The kid is always going to remember that trip. In a good way, of course.
Great stuff. That might be as close to camping as Mrs. Butcher will allow. I’m still trying to find ways to get her to eschew electricity and running water because she thinks “camping” is an RV with hookups.
I’d say, with the heating, that it’s probably the perfect opportunity. All of us go backpacking and car camping, and this is really a fun break from all of that.
There are some state parks a few hours from us where we’ve stayed in cabins, and they’re not a bad compromise between camping and hotels. I have to say that not sleeping on the ground is awfully nice.
TRUTH.
That looks wonderful, I’d love that. Reminds me a bit of backpacking in upstate NY and spending the night in Adirondack shelters, rustic but charming.
Yep, shelters make a big difference for a lot of folks.
That looks awesome. I haven’t snowshoed in awhile but used to love going in the backcountry with my snowboard on my back, hiking up the hills and riding down. Are snowmobiles allowed up there? That looks like a great place to ride. I miss my sleds but probably for the best I didn’t keep them. They are expensive to maintain and I used to get injured all the time. I do miss the amazing views you could get to in a heartbeat.
Snowmobiling is not allowed on the groomed trails, but there are lots of other trails/roads for them to use. We could hear their engines throughout the weekend.
Thank you, @MemeWeaver! What a beautiful place; the blue clean sky is not a thing in my local. So, my Alaskan friends, on of them is rustic on purpose and has a small cabin with an outhouse. She swears by Styrofoam toilet seats, and with -35 temps on the regular, I trust her.
NOTED.
A pool noodle and a 5 gallon pail can go a long way.
That would make a good quiz show challenge. “Contestants, I’m going to show you two items and you describe to me what you’d do with them. Number 1, this pool noodle is made by Rubbberright, yes, Rubberright, rubber done right! And number 2 (audience laughs, because they have flashed the answer on screens beforehand but the contestants don’t know this) this 5-gallon pail is available at your local Ace Hardware store. Yes, Ace. Individually owned and operated with over 700 locations across the US. Are you ready? You have sixty seconds to write down your answers. Clock starts now.”
That would make for one ugly top hat.
It might have been the origin of the “bucket hat.”
Awesome! Thanks for sharing.
When can we expect your book-reading friends to share on the Brain Drain?
I know, right? I will be posting on Saturday, as I’ve finally finished more books!
I used to camp growing up, that oldest brother I told you about had a camper so I’d go with him and his wife and two kids to a lake, that lake is where I lost my virginity, to the son of their good friends who had a small sailboat so there we were, just the two of us, on the not-so-high seas…
When Better Half and I got back from Rome people wanted to know how it went. “Rome was amazing. It’s everything everyone says it is, and then twice that. And we camped, which was amazing.”
“You camped. In Rome.”
“Yes, we stayed on the fifth floor of this building and when it was built each floor was owned by a family. Where we stayed had been bought and converted into a collection of bedrooms you could rent and there was a communal kitchen and a sitting area, which was fun, a real polyglot mix…”
“You stayed in a B&B.”
“No we didn’t. This wasn’t some rustic house in the middle of nowhere. We were a 15-minute walk from the Colosseum. So a couple of nights we bought our own food and made dinner and offered some to the others, like sitting around a campfire. And we had to share bathrooms. And there was no cable, only local programming. It was very primitive.”
“Have you ever heard of an old game called ‘The Oregon Trail’?”