Gladys was born in Kelly. Her family, the to hold the structure together. While Central Now thirty-one, Owen Popinchalk Mays, were among the first settlers in the Asians still move their yurts seasonally, the grew up spending summers at the Kelly Yurt Park. Today, he lives there valley, homesteading on Mormon Row in yurts in Kelly don’t move. full-time with girlfriend Joana Lau. 1896. In 1925, when the north side of Sheep In 1981, Lyn Dalebout was twenty-six Mountain collapsed in a giant landslide, slid and working as a poet, writer, and bookseller in Jackson. Her sister, Jan, also in her twenties, was a nurse at into the Gros Ventre River, and created a 225-foot-tall dam that St. John’s Hospital (now St. John’s Medical Center). They lived was half a mile wide, Gladys was seven. Two years later, the in Kelly—Jan in a “regular” house and Lyn in a yurt next door. dam broke, and the Gros Ventre River washed away most of the Jan put the yurt up after living in a similar structure in Alaska town of Kelly, including the homes of forty families, and killed in the late 1970s. The Dalebouts’ neighbors, Don and Gladys six people. Up until this time, Kelly was a bustling commercial Kent, had a twenty-two-acre property and ran it as a seasonal hub in the valley. After the flood, though, Kelly struggled to campground. The sisters wanted to lease this land year-round maintain a population; keeping people there was important to Gladys her entire life. for yurts. Gladys’ innate creative spirit also embraced the idea of a “It was just this idea of wanting to live in a yurt,” Lyn Dalebout, now sixty-two, remembers. “Who knows where these yurt park. “My mother loved to talk to other people about all great ideas came from? It was an organic process.” The sisters different sorts of ideas,” Kent says. “That’s the type of person didn’t have a vision for a community, she says, but wanted yurts who lives over there.” With the Kents’ agreement to rent them for themselves. They approached the Kents, who quickly agreed. the land, the Dalebout sisters asked their parents for help. Dawn Kent, Gladys and Don’s daughter, remembers her parents “Our parents supported the vision, and bought us the combeing very supportive of the idea of a yurt park. “For my folks, mercial sewing machine to sew the yurts and also some of the it was low-maintenance,” Kent, now in her sixties, says. What construction material,” Dalebout says. “There were no comalso appealed to Gladys was the connection to young people in mercial yurt companies at the time.” The yurts took two months Kelly. “She enjoyed the young people, because it really is not a to make. (Today, they can be bought online. A basic 450-squareplace for older people, going back and forth to the bathhouse,” foot yurt costs about $9,000. Add on wind and snow protection, Kent says. And her mother felt keeping younger people in town roof and wall insulation, and a stovepipe outlet, and the total can run up to about $14,000, depending on size.) The Dalebouts would help “keep the community of Kelly alive.” 58
JACKSON HOLE MAGAZINE WINTER 2017