Sergey

His mother or father had been Russian and he was born in Switzerland and came to the U.S. as a young man. He first went to Tibetan Lamas to study in India and Nepal and they had sent him to California because they said something like, "You don't need Mt. Kailash. There is a mountain in the United States you can live on called Mt. Shasta that is a Sacred Mountain like Mt. Kailash to do your initiated Tibetan Buddhist practices on."

So, when I met Sergey in the early 1980s he told me this story and I watched his daughter be born with his family. She is now a grown adult but he is now passed away. When I found this following story I thought of him living in his yurt with windows and a clear dome in the snow at 5000 feet at Morning Star on Mt. Shasta. It had a wood stove and plenty of insulation and a water bed. It was amazingly cool with a wood fed hot tub nearby to get into under the stars,snow or rain or sun.

I saw this article in the New York Times and thought of my friend and hope he is doing well wherever he is now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/garden/31yurt.html

There is also a slide show of their life inside and around the yurt at:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/12/30/garden/20091231-yurt-slideshow_index.html