The Best Tents For The Outdoors
Tents are usually thought of as temporary shelter for recreational uses, but many people around the planet still live in what appear to be tents all the time, permanently . All around the year, whether winter or summer, these special structures house whole families against the elements. In the steppes of Mongolia and Central Asia, nomadic peoples still use felt-covered wood lattice yurts for homes. They are like tents that may be pitched anytime, anywhere, and yet are much more roomy and strong, such that they can stand permanently if need be, as indeed many do nowadays when some steppe peoples no longer follow large herds around and are essentially settled down in one place.
Technically, a yurt isn’t quite a tent, though similarities abound a lot more than do differences. Tents conjure certain pictures that yurts do not. For starters, a camping tent is normally temporary and typically practical, while yurts and tepees, a rather similar dwelling of certain native american clans, are supposed to endure as sole abodes of their inhabitants. Indeed, we don’t talk of a tent’s inhabitants – not as such, anyway – whereas with yurts and tepees it is wholly logical to do so.
These structures are in numerous ways much more home-like than any tent can be, though a selection of tents do exist on the market now such as Big Agnes tent. Until rather recently, for example, tents didn’t sometimes have windows or openings to permit smoke to escape or get out, while yurts and tepees do because cooking is expected to be done within them, inside.
Still, some characteristics may continue to be different between these kinds of structures and tents. Owing to their virtually wholly different purposes, tents don’t have walls as thick as those of yurts and tepees, for instance. Enthusiasts in the West have changed the yurt and expanded on its ideas to create new kinds of dwelling, often made with modern high tech materials. They’re also not generally supposed to be moved often, and some are built to be permanent structures and practically immobile.