Post
by Ano » Mon Jul 11, 2016 7:02 pm
I can't speak to your specific plan, but in my experience, the Monkey Hut is a great structure in its base configuration, but it does not scale very well. If you try to make it bigger, it becomes more and more of a danger.
I had two experiences -
One was with a camp building two long monkey huts. I can't give you the exact dimensions, but I want to say it was the standard-size hut with more three or four more ribs added on. It did fine until the wind picked up, and then it just completely mangled itself. Once one part of it fails, since the whole thing is done together with tension and a bit of voodoo, it seems to explode and pop in a very magical way. It was pretty cool to witness from about twenty feet away, because we all had to run out of camp screaming bloody murder when the wind picked up. I don't camp with them anymore.
The other was building a variant, called a Galaxy hut. The thing was absolutely huge, but again I lack dimensions. We tied it down multiple times with ropes over the top ribs and other fastening that I'm too lazy to go into detail here, but it again failed spectacularly as soon as the wind picked up. It looked kind of like a dinosaur, actually, as it failed. We had to mangle the tarp and cut holes all over it in order to get it to stay on the ground. That was a windy year.
The point is, you might want to look elsewhere for your solution. Monkey Huts don't seem to scale well in my experience...
...and in my opinion, Monkey Huts work great when the Playa isn't acting up. Both of my previous experiences, the things worked great until Burning Man started to happen, and then they just failed spectacularly.
Oh, the one regular sized Monkey Hut I still know of is the one I originally built in 2011, which has survived being on Playa every single year, perfectly fine. We did have to tie it down a little extra, but it's survived many pre and post-even storms of ugly propotions.
So, it has that going for it.
