yurt yurt, we're in big sky country

I'm not really sure why Monata is called big sky country. There seems to be a normal amount of sky with mountains over the horizon. South Datkota was big sky, unervingly so with nothing in the distance. In my lack of a minds eye, I had an inverted image of the 2 states, SD is flat and kinda dead looking, and MN is surprisingly green and very mountainy. On top of green, yellowstone was especially beautiful and something im interesting in checking out, at least before it blows up.

After a few missed turns and arriving on strangers farms. I make it to the bottom back of a hill to my new home away from home, a YURT. The people living on this land built everything from scratch. this includes the yurts AND the yurtship that the family was staying at. The wife worked for the national forest service (which is really a running theme in the mid north it seems). The husband is an artist, he mainly was the one that built or contracted out the buildings from what I understood, along with some side gigs that go along the lines of STEAM. And they had a 9 year old kid that was super into chess, this kid ended up beating me in said game of chess.

Time in yurt life was an experience, I had a woodfire that i used to keep warm (went through a good amount of the stack). Due to work, had to wake up in the extremley early. The "work space" was on the 2nd floor which meant i had to go outside, around the house, up the stairs. The closest town was pretty small but my reason for going was to get snow chains just in case... like in the case of what happened 30 minutes later while i was trying to drive up the snowy hill with my car. after 30 more minutes of struggling without chains, (driving back and forth at variouse speeds and getting stuck repeatidly 80% of the way up). I eventually used the chains and that did solve my problems. last snow problems of the trip right?

So I drove through a blizzard... that was another experience where I learned 1 thing that you must do or else you get stuck:

so for the next 4 or so hours, i drove through minimal visbality, trafficked, blizzard roads... without said chains on. That all brought me into the mountains and hilly drives. After minor damage to the shielding under my car. we did end up making it safely to seattle, Washington.