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GERTEE: Portable Tent Homes made of available materials

Camp Redington is home to Gerteeville, a revolutionary lifestyle experiment in building safe, livable, and extremely affordable housing.

Gertees, like all yurts/gers, are excellent year round dwellings that can be modified to withstand extreme sub-zero temperatures, stay cool in desert and tropical heat, and they do very well in snow and severe winds too.

As very low impact, genuinely "sustainable" dwellings, they cause armchair environmentalists to go green with envy. Becoming more and more popular in state and national parks around the USA, yurts are also found in many places throughout the "modern" world. Whereas many people worldwide live in tents of various designs and makings, the yurt offers something that a wall tent just can't manage to convey, and that's a feeling of being "at home."

I'm Niki Raapana and I discovered yurts many years before I realized the potential in a pile of old used and discarded building and home materials. When I let go of the idea that yurts had to be made a certain way and had to have specific materials, a whole world of possibilities opened up before me. My quest to build a comfortable, warm tent home in interior Alaska has been both rewarding and challenging, and I've written many articles and blogs about the experience. It has also been a great honor to inspire so many others to build their own.

What is a Gertee?

Gertees are a modern Alaskan modification of the Mongolian ger, usually called a yurt by westerners. Niki originally called her version "gertee" because it can be adapted to use the teepee's ventilation design, allowing for an inside, open fire underneath the smoke hole. In Mongolia, as she later learned, gertee roughly translates to "relaxing at home."

Another aspect of gertee that differs from the American yurt concept is gertee can be made of many different kinds of new or recycled materials. This makes it possible for just about anyone to own one, and it makes them especially attractive to disaster victims left with lots of salvageable scrap materials to work with.

The gertee pictured above and to the right is a 20 foot wide frame on a 20x24 foot wooden platform. This frame was made by Tim Redington and Daniel Bryan. The walls and roof poles are from the lumberyard, and the 4 foot center roof ring is covered in a recycled piece of clear window plastic taken off an old cabin. It's covered in both new and recycled materials, including an old army parachute as a roof layer.

The seeming flimsiness of the frame fools a lot of western men used to building log houses. But Tim's finally convinced in the integrity of the whole design. It's withstood two major windstorms this past winter, several heavy snowfalls, 55 below zero, and has proven the structural soundness of a design perfected on the Mongolian steppes.

During the summer of 2008, the 20 foot gertee housed the Alaskan Homesteader's Museum. Items included artifacts from Tim Redington's many years of walking the back trails of Alaska, and family momentos left to him by his parents, major founders of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

The first gertee was built out of all scrap materials at the Denali Wilderness Lodge on the Wood River in interior Alaska. It was about 10 feet wide with 4 feet walls with an open interior firepit. It took 3 days to construct, and served as a guest house and a bath house during the summer and fall of 2004.

Worn out tents, ripped tarps, curtains, rugs, carpet, bedspreads, tablecloths, sheets, blankets, and even plastic pools all find a new life in an innovatively built gertee. Old boards can be cut into slats, old beams can be cut and tapered into roof poles. Old windows can be made into doors, and well, you get the picture.

Don't go thinking these are ugly homeless shelters or belong only in refugee camps or protected endangered human habitats. Recycled Gertees are very cute, and can also be made of fine woods and finished in luxurious fabrics. We are always on the lookout for bolts of materials that fit well with our desired interior atmosphere.

The Mongolians describe being inside their gers like being in another universe, and this applies to our gertees as well, because every gertee reflects the type of personal universe we find most comfortable. The interior furnishings can be sparse, frugal and focused at the floor level in the asian style, or filled with western tables, chairs, bookshelves, dressers, beds, sinks, toilets, showers, lofts and spiral staircases.

Gertees' wall slats are tied together with strong plastic zip ties. This means the frame does not require drilling holes in the khana at every cross. When the walls are tied and not bolted together, sticks, pvc pipe, or smooth cut wood slats all work equally well. The roof poles can be made of the same materials in the small ones, only needing to be slightly longer and stronger. The larger gertees (like the 20 footer shown on the left) have 7 foot wall slats and 11 foot ceiling poles, making it about 12 foot high in the center under the skylight.

Round buildings made of sticks and poles are found in most every cultural history in the world. Many northern places made round houses out of rocks with thatched or wooden roofs. They used snow and ice in the arctic, skins and hides around the world, and in temperate regions the coverings were woven plants, mud, and adobe. We plan to experiment with all of these different types of construction. There are also numerous ways to make brick ovens and sustainable heating sources that are part of our exploration.

Camp Redington is a wayside stop for travelers along the Edgerton Highway, providing affordable hostel accomodations and a roadside rest area for bicyclists making the long trek into the Wrangell St. Elias National Park. After the "real" camp shower was completed in 2008, Tim made a six foot wide gertee shower.

There are so many ways a gertee can be made useful, to us here in Gerteeville it seems the possibilities are endless.

People all over the world have assured us they make excellent greenhouses, arctic entryways, children's playhouses, emergency relative's bedroom in the yard, artists and writer's studios, and they may work as chicken coops and barns as well. Our next model will have a half loft. And the big gertee bathhouse is a definite go this summer. Tim is designing a small, easily portable PVC gertee model that all fits on the back of a dogsled (he builds those too). There's even been some discussion of making one out of rebar, a more "bear-proof" model for wilderness expeditions.

In the spring of 2009 I found the dollmaker on ebay selling off her stock of materials and I bought a whole bunch of long pieces of fabric for $1 each. Initially planning to make a feminine summer gertee, I went ahead and stapled a nice striped piece to the tops of my interior wall fabrics in the big 20 footer I lived in all this past winter. Then I began stapling pieces around the roof beams, and it changed the whole space. It gives the interior a finished look that the exposed beams can't convey, and it has a slightly "parasol" feeling that I have come to really appreciate. This new fabric application will be a great way to hide the RadiantGuard foil insulation and it adds another layer to help trap the heat.

This is what the new interior window fabric looks like on the original 18 foot gertee model, under reconstruction now. Gertee gets a new wardrobe every time I rebuild her, and if I take the staples out with a flathead screw driver I don't rip the materials when I take it all down.

Another new materials find is recycled PVC billboards, priced very reasonably if you live in the Lower 48 (shipping UPS to Alaska is $130.00 for a 24x24 foot tarp that costs $60). The only thing you have to promise is to put the advertising letters side down.

For building instructions and lots of pictures, visit http://www.instructables.com/id/GerTee-Portable-tent-home-made-of-recycled-materia/.