When we took delivery of our Super Ger in 2016, our Yurt Daddy Yves told us that yurts like to move – because they are nomadic, after all. The recommendation was to reset it at least once a year to replicate the Mongolian tradition of moving to seasonal locations. This ensures that the yurt is properly assembled with parts kept in good working order. In fact, the Groovy Yurts website explicitly lays out best practices, “Do not leave it up and alone for an extended period… It is not a set it up and leave it kind of deal. It is a lifestyle.” Sure, we said, we can do that… We’re all in! We earned a gold star in year one because we moved to the yurt deck. Every year after that, we failed miserably.
Perhaps it was because this was our full-time residence that we avoided the necessary disruption for as long as we could. While some people use their yurt as a minimalist yoga studio or seasonal glamping site, everything we owned was setup inside of our yurt for year-round four-season living. This made the reset more of a chore to move all our stuff out and back in and we weren’t very motivated after making things so comfy. Before we landed at Sahalee, we hadn’t moved in 15 years! (Also, our forays into wildland fire and adobe home renovation made scheduling such a move in good weather challenging.) Moving once a year suddenly didn’t sound so easy an undertaking, so our Super Ger has been resting in place for seven years with only the ‘minor’ maintenance of replacing the vinyl window panes, tension ropes/straps, fireproof canvas cover ($724), and the urgh (top flap).
Whether or not a result of our neglect or improper installation after our first move, we started to see some major points of failure in 2019, two years after our last move. For one, the toono (roof centerpiece) was leaking in wet weather and we had active water drips inside. We weren’t sure if this was attributed to a bad canvas wrap job or the degradation of the original toono in our extreme climate of freeze-thaw cycles and 50-degree temperature differentials. Had we reset the yurt annually as instructed, we could have more expediently mended the wooden structural pieces and better adjusted the canvas.
Earlier this year, we also found several huns (rafters) broken, possibly from a heavier than usual snow load on the north side. Since we weren’t staying in the yurt over the winter and keeping snow cleared off the roof throughout the season -and not regularly resetting and tightening things up as we should- we were asking a lot of our lonely Super Ger to hold things up.
The sense of urgency to address our leaky yurt and fix the roof supports was diminished a little bit since we had set up temporary residence in town at the start of COVID with our acquisition of the old adobe house we call Casablanca. It was a personal strain at the time to face two properties in disrepair, a major career change requiring extensive travel, and a public health crisis (with reduced income). We did what we could over the next few years to include the minor repairs we mentioned at top, but resetting the yurt did not happen as quickly we would have liked. At least, we did manage to order the new toono ($2800) in the Spring of 2023 to get us one step closer. View the full Groovy Yurts parts catalogue.
Turns out that 2024 was our seven year itch. With wildland fire off the schedule, we had more of an opening to give our love to Sahalee’s Super Ger. We just set a date on the calendar and the weather gods obliged with beautiful big blue skies and cooler temperatures. Our generous friends joyfully reported to duty on the yurt deck the day after Labor Day and we knocked it out. Check out the timelapse!
Prior to disassembling the structure, we had to first move out all our accumulation of residential crap. Never an easy undertaking, I again took to questioning – WHY do we hold on to so many material things? I uncovered a bag of worn out clothes kept for someday making fabric scraps to mend future worn out clothes. We removed a collection of little rubber duckies and fake feathered birds perched around the walls as quirky decor. There was a box of dusty meeting agendas and notebooks filled with scribbles from teleconferences held in some other lifetime, countless electronic gadgets with dead batteries, and bottles of outdated OTC medications that had long lost their efficacy. It felt good to clean and move things out for a refresh, but I am still suffering from ‘paralysis by analysis’ in determining how to get rid of stuff for good. I don’t want to chuck everything into the landfill or burn it, but I also can’t list every little thing for sale or giveaway in the online classifieds. Having a yard sale is another labor-intensive option. A donation box seems like our best bet, so it remains a work in progress.
Taking the yurt apart didn’t take long at all. I think we had it down in 2.5 hours. Another unsavory discovery in this process was seeing just how bad the rodents had left things under the layers.
Once we had all the coverings off, the huns and toono down, the door-wall alignment and detail work done, we could put up the new toono and secure with the 81 huns (a sacred number). We had a few little hiccups on this side of things, mostly because we were out of practice (another reason to reset more regularly), but we managed to put all the pieces up and back together in another 3.5 hours.
We were on the home stretch to finish the job in one day but the canvas cover proved to be a little more than expected. For one, the new full acrylic windows were a little tricky to work around. The old toono was completely open, so it was easy to move all around the top to ensure a tight fit and wrap of the canvas. The 6-foot ladder we were used to using inside was just a smidge too short to give us the reach we needed to get around on all sides through the hatch-style windows. By this time in the day, we were all pretty tuckered out (with being seven years older than we were at the last setup). Our solution, the next morning, was to bring in an 8-foot ladder and put two people up through the open windows to tug the canvas snugly up to the toono and tightly secure the ties to hold into place.
One other little swerve that we needed to navigate with the new toono is that the stovepipe flashing was installed in a different orientation than what we had in the original. (Evidently, we didn’t think this through when placing the order last year.) We had considered remaking our stovepipe with 45-degree bends to reach the new flashing on the back side, but the final decision at this point is to swap the flashing with one of the static windows on the front side. This will require a little more concentration and some silicone in the next couple of weeks. With the stovepipe opening left as it were, we had to rig up a temporary solution to stop any rain from coming in until we can make the swap. We fashioned a cover out of a plastic bucket lid with a brick weight tied to it.
The yurt life is certainly not for everyone, but even amid the challenges we remain committed to spending as many of our days here as we can. We believe in maintaining the smaller footprint of living off-grid and more closely to the land. We still have plans to accomplish here at Sahalee and taking care of our Super Ger is a priority above all else. This time next year, we hope to share another reset recap with you, but we are also learning to practice grace and kindness with ourselves when we miss the mark.
And a final word from our little hummingbird co-worker friends who were diligently keeping their noses to the grindstone amid all the Super Ger action… We wish them safe travels as they make their long journeys to the tropics for the winter. Onward!!