Harriman Yurt Parking, Sleds & Transport

For those of you who are accustomed to parking in the Day Use areas near Park Headquarters, you'll need to look elsewhere to leave your vehicle for your yurt visit.

There is a designated parking area for overnight winter visitors. It is located near the Park Maintenance shops. Bear left past Park Headquarters and then bear right at the "Y". The road then curves to the left and you will see two large buildings and a very large open area. As you enter this area, look left and you will see the overnight visitor parking. It is signed and pretty obvious, actually. There's plenty of legroom to spread out your stuff while rigging your sleds, etc.

We'd guess park staff keeps this area plowed. However, on our trip, they hadn't yet had a chance to plow the vacant parking spots. Luckily, we brought a shovel so we could clear areas beside our vehicle. We also brought two small folding camp chairs to make rigging a lot more comfortable.

You will need to display your park pass on the dashboard of your vehicle. We assume it's 100% safe here but, as a rule, we don't leave valuables in our vehicle.

The park rents sleds for $5 a day. They are good, solid sleds and well worth the rental price.

We chose to buy our own sleds. Having our own sleds allowed us to rig them before the trip and know exactly what was going to fit and how it was going to fit. Our "Bed Sled," the small of the two sleds, was totally rigged and ready to go before we left home. The other larger sled was also rigged at home using 3 plastic tubs and a plastic pickle bucket. In this way, we knew we could rig and lash down the gear in minutes with no "head scratching" or gear jamming.

We also had to hip straps made at the Idaho Falls Leather Shop on Park Avenue. Each strap is a double layer of 2-inch webbing with a fixed "D" ring at the center of the back. The hip straps fit perfectly below our backpacks and allowed an even distribution of the weight.

In order to know how much weight would be comfortable, we took each sled to a city park and filled each with various concrete blocks. We pretty much knew the weight limitations of each sled before we started messing around with our gear.

It's quite a short walk (or ski) over to the yurts from the parking lot. Two snowmobile trails leave the maintenance area and join the main road about 125 yards from the turn into the yurt area. In our case, we figured 10-15 minutes one-way for the gear shuttle. Without a sled, it's possible to do a round tirp to the vehicle in a mere 15 minutes on snowshoes.

Since we had never been to the yurts before, we did snowshoe over to understand the trail system before we sledded in our gear. If there's been a new snowfall, park staff will run a snowmobile over to the yurt so that you won't have to be breaking trail with your gear sled(s).