Ger Plans

The Construction of a Yurt

This set of instructions, courtesy of Monica Cellio, known as Ellisif Fkakkari in the SCA, illuminates the process of ger construction. A fairly extensive page with many diagrams showing techniques long used and tested within the SCA, this should be enough information to build a ger. Additionally, Yurt Quest provides a PDF version of these instructions (with Monica's kind permission) available for download.

How we made our own Gher or Yurt

This page is intended to give out information that we have gathered on our quest for a Yurt, and is not intended to be historically accurate. Where possible I try to note the historical method (Historical), the way we did it (We Did), the way other people did it (Other People Did), and what did not work (Don't).
Hmm, "quest for a Yurt", wonder if they've visited our little kiosk? Short, helpful instructions with diagrams.

Ger Classes
There's nothing like the hands on approach. Hopefully this marks a trend in ger information dissemination.

Woodland Yurts

We regularly run Build your own ger in a weekend courses in North Somerset. All materials, food and camping provided. Participants make their own 9' willow yurt frame to take home. Canvas or complete covers available (at extra cost). Three day courses cost ú200, no experience necessary.

In addition to classes, they also sell complete yurts of all sizes and have a how-to pamphlet available. The yurts they make and teach others to make are the kind preferred by this site; portable. The pamphlet seems a good resource and should be enough to inspire the would be yurt builder to action.

Update, the pamphlet is now available "free on the internet".

General Ger Links

Utah State University Outdoor Program Yurt

These pictures are great. For Utah students without the bucks to visit Mongolia.

The Mongolian Felt Tent

Part of an exhibition of art from Mongolia organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. This is the multimedia part from Dynamic Diagrams.

Lars' Yurt Page

Lars built a yurt using a Pacific Yurts kit. He was kind enough to keep a photo record of its construction. Note that this ger, like most comercial varieties, is obviously not a very mobile home.

Mongolia Links

Mongolia: The Legacy of Chinggis Khan

See the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco Mongolian exhibit. A book about the exhibit is also available.

Mongolia WWW Virtual Library

A collection of Mongolian related sites.

Virtual Mongol

Lots of pictures, though only one ger.

Friends of Tuva

While Tuvans are distinct from Mongolians, they share the same taste in housing.

Commercial Corner
Yurt's are cool, but Hardware stores scare me.
If you're not up to the do it yourself aproach, but still want the round house of your dreams, these guy can help.

Vermont Yurt Works

From Bill Reuther (info@vtyurt.com):

Our company, Vermont Yurt Works, manufactures and rents both wood and Aluminum framed yurts. We also sell plans for those interested. ...can be reached by phone at 802-747-1222.

This company is no longer among the web challenged. Also, Bill tells me they have developed a new camping yurt; they are designed to set up and down in minutes and in the smaller sizes will fit in the trunk of most cars. At last, what the ger was meant to be; a truly mobile home.

Advance Canvas Design- Advance Yurts & Earthworks Tipis

This well designed site includes a virtual yurt tour and a price list with many options.
And, if that weren't enough, they put our site in their Cool Yurt Links and said nice things about us.

Boojum Expeditions

I don't want to build a ger, I just want to go camping.
These guys just revamped their site and also linked back to us. They tour many places and have a nice collection of pictures.

Pacific Yurts

The original yurt kit purveyor (just check out their url). Has a nice diagram of some ger elements. They don't list prices, though.

Shelter Online

These guys produced the book Shelter. Their site gives more info on the book and up coming projects.

Shelter (Jade Mountain Inc.)

Alternative housing for sale. This place has gers, teepees, and some more modern constructs.

The Village Yurt

This single page gives pictures and inventory of a ger kit. They also list their price on a linked page.

Web Challenged Resources

Bill Coperthwaite and the Yurt Foundation

We occasionally get the question, what about Bill?
Well, Bill doesn't have a web page and the only way one of his yurts is going to be mobile is if a twister hits it.
Still, in the interests of fairness, here's a part of a letter from Dan Neumeyer:

As you may know, Bill introduced the yurt to this country more than 30 years ago, and now has built more than 200 modern yurts with schools, families, communities. His interest with the yurt is in using it as a self-empowering vehicle through which people can take part in creating their own shelter.

The Yurt Foundation
Dickensons Reach, Bucks Harbor
Machiasport, Maine 04655

They just put out a 1997 calendar, hopefully we'll get some pictures from it soon.

Miscellany

Yahoo! Yurt Search

We have only a sampling of Yurt related links, there are more all the time.

The Society for Creative Anachronism

The SCA is the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is a group dedicated to researching and recreating the Middle Ages in the present.

While Yurt Quest is not really affiliated with this group, the inspiration to build a traditional ger has its roots here. Also, many useful ger related resources now available on the net are products of SCA members.

Unfortunately, SCA based sites can contain confusing jargon and references that are unique to this group. We believe that knowing such a group exists will help in understanding some of the available ger resources. So, if you find a yurt site with curious references to things like SCA, mundane, war, pennsic, etc., you now know where it came from.

Acrobat Acrobat Reader

The free Adobe(R) Acrobat(R) Reader allows you to view, navigate, and print PDF files across all major computing platforms.

An important advantage of this is that all formatting information is maintained which means, unlike html, the pages will look the same no matter what the machine's configuration. For this reason, we present PDF files for your reading pleasure.