Mill Hollow Yurt

Another weekend, another yurt! The Mill Hollow Yurt is also located in the Uinta Mountains, but it is not as secluded as the Castle Peak Yurt. When you pull up to the yurt, it is surrounded by other buildings not used in the winter. This is a big change from Castle Peak because you don't get the feeling you are in the middle up nowhere. The inside of the Mill Hollow yurt was much newer and nicer though. The yurt was bigger around and the beds were smaller so there was much more room for lounging and eating. They also had a couple big picnic tables in the center so there was a lot of eating area. We also had a lot more people on this yurt trip. We had Toni and Misti, Alex and Ceci, Mary and Vin and I brought Hayden. Bringing Hayden ended up not being the best idea. I'll get to this later.

We met in Kamas on Saturday morning at a local restaurant called Yolk and I was thoroughly unimpressed. They took forever to get our food out, when they brought it out, the food was cold and honestly the biscuits and gravy were not at all impressive. I don't really plan on going back. After a long breakfast, we drove to the trail-head and loaded our carriers. This is when the weekend started getting exciting...

Toni has had a lot of problems with his sled this year and it wouldn't even start to get it out of his truck for this trip so he was angry. He needed to take his anger out on someone so we wrestled for a minute and he felt a little better. I thought I put up a pretty good fight considering Toni is much stronger than I am. Toni and Misti decided they would just skin to the yurt (6 miles) so the rest of us headed out.

Hayden had never driven a sled before and wanted to give it a shot so I let him drive mine. This would have been fine, but about 10 minutes into the ride, he flipped the sled off the road and it rolled on top of him. I'm glad it happened in an area where the sled was easy to retrieve, but it was still scary. It took a few minutes to get the sled off him and we were back on our way. With everything getting jumbled around, my water ended up spilling out sometime later so I had to melt snow when we got to the yurt for drinking water. I was soooo happy to have brought my own fresh water and not have to worry about melting snow, but this was now ruined...

We spent the night hanging out and eating some great homemade Thai food thanks to Toni and Misti. There was some arm wrestling (I lost), more gun shooting, and much laughter. We had to vent the top of the yurt so I was tasked to climb up the center pole and open it up. It is much higher than it looks in the photo. I didn't take any pictures, so all the ones posted here are thanks to Hayden. Speaking of Hayden, he might have drank a little too much. One minute he was happy and making everyone laugh and the next he was throwing up and sick the rest of the night. When I say sick, I don't mean throwing up a little...he was puking everywhere. He missed the garbage can many times and got it all over the floor as well. This lasted ALL night. The only person who slept through it all was Vin and he was snoring the whole time. I don't think anyone got much sleep that night. One highlight from the night was when Hayden was whining for some water so Alex got up and gave some to him and he said something along the lines of 'Stop whining and grow up'. It was pretty entertaining and we laughed about it later, but I really felt bad for Hayden. But on the other hand, I shouldn't feel too bad because he was too sick in the morning to do anything so I cleaned up the mess he made.
Sunday started off slow since everyone was tired from a lack of sleep but it ended up being a pretty good day. Toni and Misti decided to leave a little early since they didn't have a sled so I drove them back to their car while Alex and Vin explored to find a good hill for snowboarding. One of the problems with going to a new yurt was that no one knew where the good runs were. Alex and Vin did a pretty good job finding us a decent hill so when I got back we all jumped on the sleds and started lapping our new terrain. We started on a small hill, then graduated to a huge beautiful descent. It was completely open, kinda steep and perfect for avalanche country. It was scary at first, but once I took a few turns and felt the stability it was one of the best runs ever. The picture above is the first run we were doing. Mary is in the photo. And the picture below is the second run untouched. You can see Mary and Ceci at the bottom. After a run each on this perfect terrain, it was starting to get dark so we headed back to the yurt to grab our carriers.
Alex and I had been having design wars with our hitch connectors and at this point we both had good working hitches that were easy and cheap to make. I am more happy with my design because it takes less time to hook up and it seems more stable, but he disagrees. But something kinda sad happened on the way back to the car. Alex and I both have the same metal piece going from the carrier to the back of the sled and on the way back to the car, mine broke. Even though this was not part of my design, I got flack for it. I am happy that my carrier piece worked but it was too bad that the hitch itself had to break. Looks like I am onto another engineering project to find the next best hitch.

The boarding at the end of the trip made up for the bad parts that happened earlier on so all in all it was a good trip. Sunday was the Superbowl and I got home just before it ended so all the snacks were still out. It was nice to get the benefits of good Superbowl food without actually having to watch it.

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