Yurt So Good

Six-foot snowdrifts flanked the tiny wood-and-canvas hut that was to be my sleeping quarters for three nights last February in the frigid high country of Yellowstone National Park. It was late afternoon, the temperature somewhere around twenty degrees and falling fast. Next to me stood Arden Bailey, owner of the West Yellowstone–based Yellowstone Expeditions and my host at the seasonal encampment that he, his small staff of ski guides, and a dedicated clientele of powder junkies and nature lovers know as the Canyon Skiers Yurt Camp.

Bailey rapped his ski pole on one of the shack’s two solid walls, sending a miniature avalanche hurtling from its roof. “Can you believe,” he asked with pride, “that this thing is only held together by four nails?”

It’s a rare breed of traveler who opts for a winter vacation in Yellowstone National Park, smothered as it is beneath 150 inches of annual snowfall and relatively spare on creature comforts. But the 100,000 folks who head to Yellowstone each year between December and March are rewarded with crowd-free access to the park’s famed thermal features and a landscape so chock full of watchable wildlife it makes a summer trip to Yellowstone look like a slow day at the petting zoo. Still, the paradox of Yellowstone tourism is as evident during winter as it is in peak season: Though the park comprises some 2 million acres of wilderness and 1,000 miles of trails, the vast majority of visitors stick to a few very well-beaten paths.

In winter, this means that roughly 96 percent of the park’s overnight visitors hover around one of two concessionaire-operated hotels, a pair of mildly rustic lodges both located in the western half of the park. Thirty miles from either of them, within spitting distance of the magnificent Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Canyon Skiers Yurt Camp is the park’s only other winter lodging—and easily its best if you’ve come to Yellowstone in search of solitude, charismatic megafauna, or world-class cross-country skiing.

A majority of Yellowstone’s winter visitors enter the park via its north entrance at Gardiner, Montana—accessing the only park road open to auto traffic—but a trip with Yellowstone Expeditions begins in the tiny hospitality hamlet of West Yellowstone. The park’s adjacent west entrance is open only to “over-snow vehicles.” This includes both the snowmobiles that outnumber cars on West Yellowstone’s streets and a ragtag armada of tour operator- and concessionaire-owned snow coaches, variously styled vehicles with tracks instead of tires to navigate Yellowstone’s winding and unplowed roads.

Yellowstone Expeditions’ snow coaches look like something out of The A-Team. The fleet of monstrous blue conversion vans is tricked out with giant skis up front and what look like tank treads in back. Inside, though, the vans are warm and plush, free from the diesel smell that plagues other such rigs; each is manned by one of a half-dozen guides. Their off-the-cuff commentary helps turn the voyage to the yurt camp into a leisurely Yellowstone mini tour. The route passes through the Madison River Valley, a low-elevation wintering ground for elk and bison and the wolves and cougars that dine on them. It follows the Gibbon River, a geothermally heated stream that does not freeze in winter, providing habitat for trumpeter swans. Lunch is a picnic at Norris Geyser Basin, where steam from sulfurous and superheated cauldrons melt snowdrifts into bizarre, Seussian shapes. Keep your camera handy for the ride into the park.

The first thing you’ll notice as the snow coach pulls into camp are two giant, domed pseudo-tents rising like twin peaks from the snowfield. These are the yurts, a pair of wood-framed and canvas-covered circular structures that serve as the camp’s cooking, dining, and social areas. For decades, winter campers have favored deceptively sturdy structures like these, adapted from the traditional dwellings of nomadic Mongolian tribes. YE’s yurts are heated by a massive woodstove, lit by lanterns, and well stocked with snacks, tea, wine, beer, and a small library of Yellowstone literature. Wood tables and benches seat twenty or so for family-style meals. Here yurt campers sip warm drinks and swap stories during their down time—kind of like a Dunn Bros at 8,000 feet.

Sleeping quarters consist of eight shacklike “yurtlets” arranged around the two main yurts. These are the simple four-nailed structures that worried me when Bailey first showed me around camp last February. How, I wondered, could these flimsy-looking, twenty-square-foot huts possibly be comfortable with overnight temperatures dipping well below zero?

Turns out that the humble yurtlet stacks up favorably against any northwoods cabin I’ve ever spent a night in. Propane heaters keep the rooms toasty. A couple of twin beds are smothered with thick down sleeping bags and comforters, and generator-powered lanterns provide light for reading or card games. The miniature yurts aren’t luxe, of course, furnished only with simple nightstand cabinets and about a thousand hooks for snow-soggy gear. But the whole setup isn’t nearly as spartan as it seems at first blush. There are hot showers (with a clever, gravity-powered bucket-and-hose system), and one of the yurtlets is, in fact, a heavenly cedar sauna, complete with olivine stones. The secret of the Canyon Skiers Yurt Camp is that it isn’t really roughing it at all—it’ll just look like it when you show off your pictures.

The primary appeal of the camp is as a home base for some of the best cross-country skiing in the country. Bailey is YE’s lead ski guide, and in addition to the twenty-six years he’s spent leading backcountry ski trips, he brings an intimate knowledge of the park from an earlier career as a National Park Service naturalist. The man gets visibly excited about Yellowstone’s geology and history, and he’s all too happy to pause along the trail to describe the minutiae of geyser plumbing or elk migration patterns. All of YE’s guides share Bailey’s passion and expertise.

Because the snow coaches can access virtually any trailhead in the park, the potential ski routes are innumerable. Beginners can stick close to camp, winding their way through a quiet forest of lodgepole pine on the two-mile Roller Coaster trail, keeping an eye out for wolf tracks. A 1.5-mile ski along a nearby road leads to 8,859-foot Dunraven Pass and views that stretch as far as the Teton Range, seventy-five miles to the south. When muscles are sore, there’s the option of shorter jaunts on snowshoes or sightseeing in the snow coaches.

Guides lead intermediate and advanced skiers on challenging routes into Yellowstone’s backcountry, breaking trail to reach rarely glimpsed hot spring basins or valleys teeming with wildlife. During three days with YE, I skied alongside a seventy-five-head bison herd as they plodded single-file across the Yellowstone Plateau. I watched a frustrated coyote trying to steal fish from river otters, and I skied into extinct geyser basins where snow-capped, four-foot sinter cones looked like giant mushrooms. Each evening, I snow coached back to the yurts, exhausted and awed.

Meals at camp are a social affair. My fellow yurt dwellers last winter included a young, adrenaline-fueled married couple, a pair of genteel retirees, and a crew of nature documentarians shooting a film for the BBC (such in-the-know folks are frequent guests). In the mornings, we planned our trips together over heaping plates of pecan pancakes, sausages, and yurtmeal” (delicious homemade oatmeal with fruit). At night, we passed platters of thick steaks and found out who face-planted and who spotted a wolf pack during the day.

Maybe the best tradition at the Canyon Skiers Yurt Camp is the after-dinner ski to the nearby Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Standing on the canyon’s rim on a full-moon February night, what impresses most isn’t the way the moonlight whitewashes the pine-speckled cliffs. It isn’t even the foamy white noise of water hitting rock as the Yellowstone River tumbles half-frozen over the 308-foot Lower Falls. It’s that you and a few companions have this entire scene to yourself.