Yurts. They are awesome.

Well, I am attempting to keep up with my promise to blog more often. I have been waiting for pictures from the Yurt, but decided I had better tell of my adventures before too much time passed away.

So last weekend was MLK day, which meant we had a three-day weekend. I, along with two of my roommates, had signed up, through the Honors Program, to go on a two-day backpacking trip in Cedar Breaks National Park. SO MUCH FUN. It was a Partners in the Parks adventure, which meant we were volunteering to do some kind of work for the National Park. In this case, we had volunteered to staff the Ranger's yurt for a couple of days.


(Here is something of what our Yurt looked like. The snow wasn't quite that high though.)

It was a short hike to the yurt, only about 3/4 of a mile. And we got to do it in snowshoes! I am quite the snowshoeing expert now. We hiked all over that area. Anyways, We left Cedar aroung 7:30 am Saturday morning. There were only 10 spots open for students, plus Captain (Prof. Nickerson, director of the Honors Program) and Petersen (one of my English professors) so it was a nice, small group. We drove up to Brianhead and, during the attempt to park the cars, got Captain's suburban stuck in a snow bank. It took all of us, plus a Ranger, a botanist, an intern and, when all else had failed, the sheriff to get it out again. After that exciting adventure, we unloaded and hiked to the Yurt. On the way, the Ranger and the botanist pointed out awesome facts and we held awesome discussions. When we reached the yurt, we got the stove running, ate lunch, and set up our toilet--the pog-wog, or el ba~no natural as it came to be called. Since we had to pack everything out, we basically took a five gallon bucket and screwed a toilet seat on the top. Captain's idea. He was really proud of it.
Then we had lunch, and I had an MRE (courtesy of my wonderful father) and impressed everyone with my lunch (which is why I mention it--its the only meal worthy of mentioning, even though the others were really good as well, like grilled cheese sandwiches[without butter] and crawdad gumbo[with real crawdads] anyways...)
So after lunch we explored a little bit and relaxed. We were going to make snowcaves, but the snow wasn't deep enough for most of us to make them. You need a drift that is at least five feet deep, but we could only find three-four feet. It was kind of crazy though to find out we were walking three to four feet off the ground though! John and Denise made snowcaves, and they were going to sleep in them, but then John's cave collapsed on top of him. Captain went pull him out, but, according to John, he had a testosgerone/adrenaline rush and just RARGHED right out of the snow. Like the hulk. In any case, even though Denise's cave turned out quite well, they decided to sleep with everyone else in the Yurt.
Then the head ranger from Zion came to speak to us (a really big deal) and that was really interesting. She, and the head ranger from Cedar Breaks as well, talked mostly about park management and what went into that job. The botanist talked about botanist things, such as the bark beetle cycle, and foreign plants that come on visitors clothes and extremely rare plants found in Cedar Breaks and the like. It was really interesting.
We went on a night hike after dinner (the rangers had left) and stargazed. The sky was absolutely gorgeous and we saw the most incredible comet! It lasted about 5-7 seconds and took up half of the night sky. SO COOL.
Sleeping kind of sucked. We weren't cold, or at least I wasn't, but the yurt floor was pretty hard and we were all kind of crammed. I did feel bad for Nickerson though. He slept outside in a tent and it was really cold that night.
Anyways, next day was just kind of chill. We had to service people (hot chocolate and warm stove) from 10 to 3 but only 2 people (or 1 Captain) had to be there, so we decided to go on a hike. We hiked out to the rim and it was incredible. I wish I had pictures! But I will hopefully...soon...eventually....Anyways, we had to be back at the yurt by one, so we decided to come back to the rim that night for the sunset. We hiked back off-road and I felt like I was in the artic. Very cool and lots of fun.
When we went back that night (this time Captain came and Monica and Jamie stayed to make dinner) we went the same way and, on a particularly icy hill, slid down on our backs and fronts like penguins. It was quite amusing. And at another point, we charged down a hill screaming battle-cries, such as FOR NARNIAAA!! though some people just yelled. We were filming it, and it was supposed to be quite epic, but... have you ever tried to run in snowshoes? Well, if you haven't, it is much like trying to run in shoes that are too big for your feet--like clown shoes. We had actually gotten quite good at it, but charging down a hill was apparently much different than runnning a race across a field. We made it about five steps, more or less, before we were falling down and snow was flying everywhere and we were trying to stand back up and resume our epic-ness and we would just fall down again and slide the rest of the way down the hill. We were laughing really hard too, and that didn't help much. I am laughing now just thinking about it. So, so, so funny!
In any case, the sunset was amazing. Again, I wish I had pictures!
That night, everyone slept better, though not great, and no one was ready to go back to school, though we were ready for hot showers and clean tap water (we melted snow for our water) and bathrooms. But I could have probably stayed up there for a week and have been perfectly happy. I think all of us could have.
Well, that was my yurt adventure. Hopefully I'll be able to post pictures soon, so stay tuned for more.
Thanks for reading! Cheers!