Building 30ft Yurt: Working the Land

[Ethan]

Hello all. its been a while since I have been here or posted, the yurt is still in the making and now the property is also being prepared. The past few weekends I have been working cutting trees and surveying where the driveway, yurt, outhouse, and all will be constructed. This thread correlates with Building 30ft yurt. http://www.yurtforum.com/forums/buil...-yurt-583.html As done in that thread I will post things as they happen, the materials used and the overall process. Again questions, comments and advise are encouraged! Thanks for reading, more to come sooner or later on both threads!
First picture seen here is the general building lot, the yurt will sit into the side of the hill on the left, not very clear yet but will be in time.

[Bob Rowlands]

That's a nice lot you and Hannah have there Ethan. Good shelter from the wind. Based on the photo I'd say you have a very nice site for your yurt.

Now for a comment about that forest. I live in Colorado Springs, CO. We have had several years of killer drought here, and the climate is semi arid to begin with. There have been two major fires here in the last couple years that consumed ~ 900 homes. That's not a typo- ~900 homes is the total.

I'm a carpenter and helping rebuild the homes that were lost. It is now mandatory to do 'fire mitigation' on unburned lots in forested area. In brief, that consistes of thinning the trees 30' from the home, and clearing low branches up for about 16', and removing dead scrub, so that ground fire will not spread up into the canopy and race across the forest as it did the last coupleyears.

Now that I am working on rebuilding homes in the burned forest, I've seen where 'mitigation' isn't the bureauocratic BS I initially thought. Mitigation prevents loss of homes -plural. I have seen property that was mitigated prior to the Black Forest fire, (500+) that had low fire roar across the land without burning the primary residence, where adjacent property that had a full unmitigated forest and resultant canopy fire, was lost, and the fires just kept racing across all unmitigated properties.

Just saying. Food for thought. I certainly don't mean to throw a wet towel on your plans. You have a beautiful lot. Your circumstances might be totally different than these.

Either way, good luck. You are doing good.