In the spring of 2002, Nick Farrell told his father he wanted to build another yurt. It was a warm afternoon, and they were standing beside the 320-square-foot wooden yurt Nick’s parents, Greg and Cathy, had constructed in 1976 on their 90-acre property in Keene, New York. Nick’s father had discovered the tiny village in the northeastern Adirondack Mountains in 1956 when he worked as a counselor at Camp Dudley, a nearby summer camp that’s been in operation since 1885. Leading canoe trips and hikes through the region’s lush forests of pine, hemlock, spruce, and beech trees had a profound impact on Greg. Over the years, he continued to frequent the northern Adirondacks to camp, hike, and fish. When he met Cathy in 1965, their second date was a trek on Mount Marcy, a forested 5,344-foot peak that is the tallest mountain in New York.

By 1973, the married couple was living in a Manhattan loft, daydreaming about finding their own land up north. That year, during one of their trips to Keene, a local real estate agent showed them 100 acres of dense forest that abuts abandoned logging trails. Greg was especially fond of the brook cutting through the middle. Throughout the year, the sound of running water drowns the forest in white noise. To get to the stream, visitors hike a quarter mile from the road through the woods. There is no path wide enough for a truck, which means all gear and supplies must be packed in to the off-grid site. After a few years of camping in tents, Greg and Cathy decided it was time for a permanent rustic shelter by the stream bank. They wanted to build it themselves. But Greg had limited carpentry experience—he’d never assembled anything more complicated than a birdhouse. Also, the couple had only two weeks of vacation from their jobs in the city, so they understood that their architectural options were limited. A friend suggested they consider a circular dwelling called a yurt. He recommended Greg contact a man named Bill Coperthwaite.

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Nick, Cathy, Greg, and Andrew Farrell.

At the time, Coperthwaite was developing a reputation for designing simple do-it-yourself yurts that were popular among back-to-the-landers across North America. Used by Central Asian nomads for thousands of years, traditional yurts are tentlike structures with collapsible wooden frames covered in fabric and held together by rope. Bill, a shaggy-haired former math teacher who died in 2013, pioneered a way of building a modernized, more robust version of a yurt. In 1968, while earning a PhD in education at Harvard University, he constructed and lived in a small red-roofed yurt on campus; he built the structure in two days using $600 worth of materials. By 1973, he was living alone on 500 acres in the woods of Machiasport, Maine, where he wound up constructing no fewer than six yurts—including a hulking three-tiered yurt topped by a cupola. He relied mostly on hand tools. His compound had no phone or electricity. To contact Bill, aspiring yurt builders wrote snail mail. If interested, he would reply with a hand-drawn map showing the way to his home.