PORTLAND — Our state parks in Oregon are well loved. With ever-increasing crowds of campers and a record number of visitors last year, our parks have reached an almost cult-level status of appreciation. Their place in our community seems to be untouchable.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Back in the early 1990s, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department was struggling. Newly separated from the Oregon Department of Transportation and left to fend for itself, the parks system was running low on money and morale, facing a huge maintenance backlog with no clear path forward.
Parks Director Bob Meinen, who led the agency from 1992 to 2000, said he had inherited a demoralized agency “that had been knocked around quite a bit” and was “trying to figure out where it was going,” according to an article in The Oregonian at the time of his retirement.
He tasked park managers to find new sources of revenue, several park officials said. While most of their ideas sputtered, one took hold in a big way: yurts.
The humble structures alone didn’t save Oregon’s state parks, but yurts gave the agency a boost when it needed one most.
Yurts go big
In 1993, Craig Tutor was working as a regional manager for Oregon state parks on the north coast. In charge of some of the state’s busiest park sites, he knew all too well the issues they faced. One of the biggest problems? A busy camping season in summer, and empty sites come fall and winter.
What would bring more people into campgrounds during western Oregon’s rainy season?
That summer, Tutor was visiting the Oregon State Fair when he stumbled upon a display by Pacific Yurts, a Cottage Grove company that built simple, customizable yurts – at the time, a structure closely affiliated with Mongolians but little known among Oregonians.
“I looked at that and thought, ‘That would do it,'” Tutor said, the solution staring him in the face.
Tutor persuaded Meinen to try out two yurts at Cape Lookout State Park that spring. Without any advertising, without even a phone reservation system, the two yurts booked up fast.
“I knew we had a hit on our hands,” Tutor said. “I knew two wasn’t enough, we needed them all down the Oregon coast.”
By fall, 16 yurts had been installed at eight state parks along the coast. In 1996, the agency added 50 more. Parks added additional yurts to try to keep up with demand, and after a big push in 1998, there were a total of 152 yurts in 19 parks across the state. Today, there are 192 yurts across the state park system.
Suddenly, yurts were everywhere. In addition to regular articles in The Oregonian, Oregon’s yurts were featured in The New York Times and Sunset Magazine. They were hailed as “the camper’s answer to the RV,” the experience “like climbing into a storybook.”
Oregon state parks created its phone reservation system in 1998 in large part because of the yurts, which were then booking a year in advance during the busy summer months.
“I was surprised,” said Larry Becker, the south coast district manager for Oregon state parks. At the time, Becker managed Sunset Bay State Park near Coos Bay, which added four yurts in 1996 and now has eight. “I didn’t realize that there was a recreation hunger. There were folks out there who were looking for a unique experience.”
While initially hesitant about the big push for yurts, Becker said he quickly became a convert when parks started bringing in people who typically weren’t interested in camping. The yurts came with just enough comfort to attract a whole new audience to the campgrounds.
Alan Bair, owner of Pacific Yurts, said that rustic comfort attracted him to work with yurts from the start. Following the style of the traditional Mongolian shelters, he built his yurts out of wood and canvas, offering just enough protection from seasonal rains.
When his yurts started popping up at state parks around the state, he saw a benefit that transcended the sales.
“It was good for the business, and more important, it was good for the state,” Bair said. “It wasn’t just the orders, which were great, but it was also the fact that the concept spread and that other states picked up on the ideas.”
Bair said his Pacific Yurts are now at parks in more than 30 states, including Washington and Idaho. That’s not to mention the many privately owned campgrounds and rental properties now adorned with yurts, which have since become a nationwide trend.
“We were a forerunner,” Bair said. “We were making ‘glamping’ structures before that word had even been coined.”
Mixed emotions
Yurts were an immediate hit with campers, but within Oregon state parks, the reaction was mixed.
Among the biggest dissenters were park managers and camp hosts, who were tasked with cleaning and maintaining the new structures. They had been used to raking out campsites, Tutor said, and suddenly they felt like they were running a hotel.
“I don’t think they really got it, what was going on,” he said. “It took a lot of convincing.”
Becker, a park manager himself at the time, said long-term maintenance was also a big concern, especially at a time that was already financially lean for the agency.
“How are you going to take care of them?” he said, remembering the worry. “We knew we were adding more yurts than we had staff to take care of them.”
For those at the head of the agency, however, the yurts were a huge opportunity. They provided a new source of revenue, sure, but bigger than that was the publicity and excitement they generated. Suddenly, everybody was talking about Oregon state parks.
“I think they raised publicity for state parks at a time when we were hurting,” Tutor said of the yurts. “They brought attention to the parks at a time when it was crucial.”
Despite the success of yurts, in 1996 the state parks agency ran out of money. State legislators sought solutions of their own to bring in new revenue.
Some Republican lawmakers proposed turning state park campgrounds over to private contractors, according to reporting in The Oregonian at the time. Others proposed charging out-of-state campers more than Oregonians, or logging park lands.
Meinen countered with Measure 66, a ballot measure that ensured state parks would get a portion of Oregon Lottery funds. The measure passed overwhelmingly, and continues to fund the agency today.
