Back in the 80's I lived in a tipi for two and a half years. I was attending college in Santa Fe. I got some financial aid and decided not to waste it on rent. I used a few hundred dollars to buy a tipi and invested the rest in a bicycle shop which provided a small income while I attended school. The tipi was located at 8500 feet above sea level a quarter mile from a good spring in a canyon between Atalaya and Talaya mountains. I excavated the side of the mountain and made a level 25-foot diameter tipi site. I rolled boulders and rocks around the side of the embankment to prevent erosion. I painted the tipi brown to camouflage it. It was a 16 footer. I scrounged carpet padding and scraps from behind a carpet store and bought a sheet-metal wood stove. I dug a fire pit in the center of the floor and lined it with rocks and put the stove there. I ran the stove pipe out the smoke flaps and closed the flaps around the stove pipe. I put a two-inch stove pipe flashing insulator around the stove pipe where it passed through the flaps to prevent a conflagration.
Setting it up and eventually taking it down were big jobs. I don't remember how many tipi poles I used but there were probably at least 20. Each pole was a de-branched aspen tree, smoothed out with a knife. The poles have to be smooth so water runs down them and doesn't drip.
To get to my tipi I'd ride my bicycle up Canyon road and park it under a bridge where I'd chain it to a big water pipe that ran under the bridge. I kept the big chain and lock chained to that pipe when I wasn't parked there so I wouldn't have to carry the chain. From the bridge it was about a 30-minute hike up the mountain to the tipi, which was about 1000 feet higher in elevation than the bridge.
I had the best "front porch" in town. I had a rock ledge 100 feet up the canyon which gave me a great view of Santa Fe and the Rio Grande Valley, Los Alamos and the mountains behind Los Alamos.
In the wintertime it got pretty cold up there, but I had a plentiful supply of fire wood from the surrounding ponderosa pine forest.
I had a Coleman double burner stove. I kept rice and beans and dry foods in mason jars to protect the food from mice.
I had a dog--part coyote, part malamute. She was a sweetheart. When I lived up there she grew from a puppy to a young dog. When she went into heat the local coyotes would come around at night and I'd have to hog-tie her to keep her in at night.
Below is a 1981 newspaper photo of me on my bike with my puppy. I am carrying the rake and shovel because I had been excavating the tipi site.
