How to Keep Your Yurt from Blowing Away

Different places have different weather conditions that your yurt has to deal with.  Rain and snow are not much of a problem in the desert, but wind is.  The yurt is strong enough to withstand most winds, but wind is sufficiently strong to shove a yurt sideways.  Hence stakes and tiedowns are advisable.  In some places, people used some sort of anchor to tie the crown of the yurt to the anchor driven into the ground in the center of the yurt.  A ten or twelve foot yurt isn't big enough to allow for an indoor anchor that wouldn't get in the way so all the anchoring was done on the outside.

The twelve foot yurt tied down to stakes driven into the sand every few feet.  We did this after almost getting blown away at our previous location.  But as it turned out, at this location, the wind never came up strong enough  to put these tiedowns to the test. Tiedowns went from the edge of the roof around the tension rope that circles the wall and down to stakes driven into the ground. Stakes were an assortment of one foot lengths of rebar and assorted stakes from other tents.

At this particular location in Death Valley, the ground was covered with a thick layer of crushed rock that was hard to drive any stakes through, so we did the next best thing and tied our anchor ropes around big rocks.  As in the picture above, the tiedowns didn't get a good test,