Yurts and more add lure to spring camping

Offseason camping has plenty of advantages. Because not a whole lot of people do it, you pretty much get your pick of the campsites. There's almost no chance of getting stuck having to pitch your tent 'twixt the yellowjacket-riddled, filled-to-overflowing dumpster and the campground's only pit toilet, also filled to overflowing. Smaller crowds also mean less chance of fellow campers spoiling your back-to-nature time with remote-control toy Hummers and boozy radio sing-a-longs of "Sweet Home Alabama."

But there's a reason it tends to be just you, the ranger and not too many other folks populating the campgrounds this time of year. It can be cold. And I'm not sure if everyone is aware of this, but it gets colder throughout the night. My past experience from early-spring camping near Bellingham has been that if you start the night a tad chilly, you can rest assured that come morning, your campmates will be using hammer and chisel to chip you out of a block of ice.

But, as my family and I found out on a recent weekend "camping" trip to Snohomish County's Kayak Point Regional Park — northwest of Everett, overlooking Port Susan and Camano Island — it doesn't have to be this way. We camped in a yurt, which, along with being fun to say, is a heated, circular dome tent featuring probably every 6-year-old's favorite thing in the world, bunk beds.

On a cloudless, million-star night — which we ogled through the yurt's skylight — the three of us were warm and cozy while temperatures outside dipped to the low 30s.

"It's 30 degrees warmer in one of these," said Eric Holmquist of Everett, who stayed in a couple yurts down the path with some friends from Minnesota. "I'd never tent camp this time of year, but this is great."

Sure is. The following morning we could hear someone outside scraping ice off a windshield. The thermometer in our yurt read 68 degrees. And because we just threw our blankets and pillows on the bunk beds, our camping set-up took about the same amount of time as it took for our 6-year-old to come up with five words that rhyme with yurt — "hurt, dirt, squirt, Burt, mert." (Is "mert" a word?)

It's catching on

Kayak Point's Yurt Village is just one of the growing list of opportunities in the Northwest for "comfort camping" — that is, camping with more than just a tent, but not quite in the cushiness of an RV. More and more parks are offering structures such as yurts, cabins, platform tents and tepees for folks who want to experience a night in the great outdoors without really roughing it. Washington State Parks offers a few yurts, cabins and platform tents at various parks, with 50 to 100 new yurts to come throughout the state over the next few years.

"The trend is that people aren't taking quite as long of vacations," said Virginia Painter, spokeswoman for Washington State Parks. "They're going for more long weekend, three- and four-day type trips. And if you have limited time you don't want to spend a whole lot of it loading up and getting ready. With a yurt or a cabin, you just throw your sleeping bag inside and you're set."

Oregon State Parks is even more yurt crazy, with 190 of them. Most are located at parks along the Oregon coast. The state also offers 56 cabins, 10 tepees and two covered wagons for comfort camping. Chris Havel, a spokesman for Oregon Parks and Recreation, said that such camping options address three reasons surveyed park-goers in that state said they don't use state parks more often: lack of time, travel-distance barriers and poor weather.

"Yurts, cabins and other kinds of covered camping help reduce the amount of time it takes to go camping — you don't have to set up and break down — and they give you a warm, dry place to camp in all seasons," Havel said.

Yurts originated in Mongolia — some say more than 2,500 years ago — as shelters for nomadic herders. The circular shape withstood the wind better than flat surfaces, and traditionally the walls were made of animal skins hung on poles.

With its lattice wood and canvas walls, hardwood floors, locking door, not to mention heater and electricity, our 16-foot-diameter yurt — one of 10 at Kayak Point — was a bit removed from that but the concept was the same. From the outside, it somewhat resembled a very stubby green rocket or a gazebo with solid walls. But the inside, with a skylight at the apex of its 10-foot-high domed ceiling, felt surprisingly spacious. A set of bunk beds and a futon ensure that a family of five could fit and sleep comfortably.

"It's like a kid's playhouse, but adult-sized," is how my wife, Jen, described it.

The yurts at Kayak Point are wheelchair accessible, though the gravel walkway from the parking lot would probably require some assistance. No cooking is allowed in the yurt, so as with a typical campsite, each yurt site has a fire pit and picnic table. Water, restrooms and showers are nearby.

Better than tents?

After settling in on a sunny Saturday afternoon, we headed down the park's quarter-mile wooded trail to the beach. We spent hours combing the 3,300-foot-long shoreline, our son's intent to collect seemingly every single shell, cobble and piece of driftwood he came across — which he, without fail, handed to Jen or me to carry. From the 300-foot pier we eyed seals and sea stars and watched scuba divers descend into the chilly, darkened depths.

Unlike typical tent camping trips, my wife and I found ourselves not at all concerned that ravens or raccoons or fellow campers with dubious intent might ravage our stuff. We locked our yurt's door on the way out.

"People like that the yurts have locking doors," Painter said. "We hear that a lot from single moms camping with their kids. In a tent they might not feel as safe."

That night, which we realized comes earlier when camping offseason, we played countless games of Uno and Blink. We also, perhaps, took the comfort-camping concept a bit far for we dined in our yurt on Wendy's take-out.

When the stars came out, we stepped outside to take a look at Orion and a host of other winter constellations that we've never seen before on camping trips. When it turned too chilly we went back in the yurt, climbed in the upper bunk bed and watched through the skylight.

And we were warm. Quite cozy, too. And it was a good thing.

Mike McQuaide is a Bellingham-based freelance writer and author of soon-to-be published "Day Hikes! Central Cascades"(Sasquatch Books). He can be reached at mikemcquaide@comcast.net.