Yurt Sweet Yurt—Version 2!

I think I already mentioned this on the blog, but we purchased a second yurt with the intention of getting it up as a second rental income property (now officially listed & named Midnight Sun Yurt). For those keeping track, we bought our log cabin where we live in August 2019, the first yurt (Evergreen Yurt) in August 2021 and now the second yurt (Midnight Sun Yurt) in August 2025. Door-to-door, the second homes are .3 miles from our cabin, a 5-minute walk, a 3-minute bike ride, or a 1-min wheeler ride. 

Owning 3 properties sounds impressive, but anyone who owns one home knows that this means three times the headaches … I cannot emphasize enough what it’s like to own a home in Interior Alaska. A fully-stocked home improvement store is 114 miles away. You can beg for something on our local Facebook page and bet that someone will have it deep in the crevices of one of their 10 outbuildings. And perhaps the greatest conundrum, there are a lot of enthusiastic handy people willing to lend a hand, but no one is an expert in anything. 

We’ve been renting out our first yurt, Evergreen Yurt, every summer since May 2022, and basically have been 80-90% full for rentals through the season (not 100% because we host a lot of friends & family!). Even though this second yurt, Midnight Sun Yurt, could have the same occupancy rate, we gave ourselves a lot of grace with getting the rental up and going. We didn’t have time to work on it in the fall. Then we experienced our coldest winter ever, so any work had to wait until the spring/summer. Would we have it ready by the start of the season in May? Definitely not. Could we be ready to list it by mid-July? Maybe. 

And we did it! We started dedicating every free minute to working on it June 8, and got it done July 14. It does help that all the fixtures (like counters, etc) were in place, and we had collected decor over time. But the little details seem to be the most time-consuming. 

The biggest pain-in-the-butt (no pun intended) project was the outhouse. I suppose if you don’t want to think about poop, you should ignore this part of the post. 

I once read that 2% of Alaskan residents live without indoor plumbing, and that seems surprisingly low. I can count on one hand how many of my friends in the Denali area actually have a flush toilet. All this to say, Alaskans have their own lexicon, and outhouses are a common conversational piece. “How deep is your outhouse hole?” “Do you use a 55-gallon drum to catch your poop?” “Do you have any spare blue foam?” (FYI, blue foam serves as a “heated” toilet seat). 

Anyway, let’s focus on the “how deep is your outhouse hole” question. When we bought our cabin, our outhouse had a 55-gallon plastic barrel to catch the goods, and we have to get it sucked out, almost like a septic. In theory, you could dig a big hole & let nature take its course with decomposition, but that happens so slow here, most people end up just moving their outhouse when the pit fills. 

So when we purchased yurt #1 (Evergreen), we followed the same 55-gallon pattern. However, the area where the yurts live have melting permafrost & groundwater issues. (If you missed our previous outhouse misadventures with yurt #1, read more here.)

Another outhouse saga has been the fact that our guests poop & pee … prolifically … And they are not conservative with the toilet paper (no judgement?). What does that mean for us? The 55 gallon-container needs to be sucked out twice in a 4-month season. At $300+ per visit, we’ve estimated that it’s like $1 per poop. Soooooo … Justin came up with a MacGyver idea of digging a larger hole & using a larger container. These 275-gallon tote are normally used for hauling water, but we’re giving it an alternative career. According to our informal survey, 1 out of 5 Alaskans think it’s a brilliant idea. The other 4 scratched their heads & said good luck. The potential problem list we can’t imagine is still TBD. The point is, the outhouse is ready for guests to hang their rear over a hole to do their business as many times as they want. 

I’m betting that was probably way more than you wanted to know! The point is, Midnight Sun Yurt is officially listed on Airbnb, and we’ve shockingly already wracked up 11 nights booked. That speaks volumes for the demand in the growing popularity of independent travelers to the Denali area.