The Yurt..

I can’t recall if we’ve talked about Maynooth and Blackfly – I expect we have – probably last Labour Day when we went up north for the big party.  Blackfly is that 100 acres of forest/bush that we own with 15 others. Its off the road, there is a barn and over the past few years, people (including us) have built a yurt. A yurt is a traditional Mongolian structure – round, made of sticks, covered in canvas. Ours is gorgeous – no thanks to my labour – which involved cutting down some saplings a few years ago – there is a skylight, a woodstove, a raised wood floor,  and a glass and wood door. Partly out of a need to brush the snow off of the roof of the yurt, and partly for fun, we decided to stay in the yurt overnight this week. 

Between one thing and another, we arrived at the end of the road to the yurt later in the day than we had hoped. As we arrived we saw the lassie Olathe, one baby at the breast and pulling her toddler on the sled, walking to the neighbours to do laundry. What a toughie! It was about 4:30 pm and we knew it would get dark soon. But we knew that the ‘road’ was straight and there was little worry about getting lost. So Mac and I strapped on our snowshoes, pulled on our backpacks and put the firewood we would need on the sled. Sidney didn’t have snowshoes. We didn’t anticipate any trouble as we figured Sidney wouldn’t sink too badly. But we were wrong. The snow was really deep – probably about two feet of it. Lots of deer, rabbit, squirrel and other mysterious tracks. The packs were heavy and my snowshoes kept coming off. We trudged along, sinking in the snow. Sidney had a meltdown but honestly, in the dark – half-way along the three km route, there was little I could do other than encourage him to sing ‘hi ho, hi ho, its off to the yurt we go’ one more time.

At one point, Mac got really grumpy and abandoned his backpack. It was worse, he argued to carry it through the snow while dragging the sled than to return later.  At another point I  burst into laughter – “This is what we do for fun!” I giggled. “This is ridiculous!”

After struggling through the snow for about two hours, we got to the yurt and fortunately it was in great shape. I started the fire in the woodstove while Mac went back to get his backpack. We rolled out our sleeping bags, crawled in and read Harry Potter books for an hour until we went to sleep. The yurt heated up pretty well – and I could hear the snow melting as it warmed. As the temperature dropped (it was about -4 outside), the dripping would stop and I’d add wood to the stove.  In this way, we kept the stove going all night.

In the morning, we cleared off about a foot of snow off the roof of the yurt and headed back to the road. It wasn’t that much easier, even though we’d drunk the water and beer and burned the firewood. Mac’s snowshoe broke and he was clambering through the snow.  Eventually we made it out. But we felt winter-heroic… we’d survived!