This is the seventh (give or take a year) that I've gone up with friends to the yurts in the State Park by Cameron Pass. We pass the days cross country skiing, sledding (some years), chopping wood, melting snow for water, sharing cooking and cleaning. We live simple for a few days. The yurt has two bunk beds, a wood stove, a gas stove (thank goodness)hooked up to propane tanks, a gas light over the stove, a cupboard of games and maps, some dishes, pots and pans, and hooks, lots of hooks, to hang backpacks, ski gear, sacks, and foodstuffs. 
The yurt is set at about 9600 feet in the Medicine Bow range of mountains that form the eastern boundary of North Park. The mountains have broad meadows, steep mountain trails, thick forests and open glades for skiing (no snow shoes for us). And they have vistas that open onto other mountains to the west by Steamboat Springs and to the south to the Never Summer Mountains. From the porch, we can watch Mount Richthofen, the Nokhu Crags, the Seven Utes catch the morning sun, the afternoon storms, the rising and falling of cloud banks, the setting sun...the scene changes from minute to minute as we make breakfast or take off our gear from an ski trip.
We all bring books. I'm reading "Out Stealing Horses" (in Norwegian "Ut og stjele hester"). "Hjemme", by the way, means "at home" in Norwegian...for some reasons I don't quite understand, I feel at home at the yurt, each year as I unlatch the front door, take off my skis and begin to fill the large bucket with snow for melting, it seems as if I have arrived back at the place I come from.
