What happens when a Colorado girl goes on her first family hut trip? By Rachel Walker
There’s a chill in the air as I shush my babbling three-year-old and then coax him out of a room filled with bunk beds and 11 sleeping family members. Into the wood-hewn living area of our high mountain hut we go. Outside, pale hints of sunrise streak through the dark. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I admire the silhouette of the pine forest beyond the deck that encircles this sturdy home—ours for the next three days. I squint, and the jagged peak to the north comes into focus in the day’s new light. I point it out to Silas, expecting a sweet parenting moment to materialize. But when I look over my shoulder, I realize he’s gone.
“Silas?!” I whisper (more like a scold) into the dark cabin, fearful he’s marched into the bunkroom to rouse everyone else.
“Here, Mama!” he shouts, ducking out from the massive wood-burning cook stove that separates the kitchen and the dining room. He’s got a box of strike-anywhere matches in one hand and a large piece of wood in another. “Fire?”
Did I mention he is three?
I’m alarmed, but not enough to grab the fire makers from his grubby little hands, lest the inevitable tantrum that would follow wake up the rest of the crew—my husband’s extended family who traveled from sea level a few days prior. We’ve converged on the Ben Eiseman Hut, part of Colorado’s storied 10th Mountain Division Hut system, for a high-elevation family reunion that I planned, promising everyone it would be the trip of a lifetime. My goal was to lure the east coasters out of their comfort zone and into ours. It worked. For the first time since our wedding in 2008, Jeff’s entire immediate family (and then some—his mom’s boyfriend, his brother-in-law’s sister and her husband and daughter) agreed to a family visit in our time zone.
Once I stopped patting myself on the back, I realized what I had wrought: I just made myself the leader of a 13-person, four-day trip at a remote rustic cabin, with no running water and no toilet, perched at 11,180 feet—just below treeline. The highest point in Vermont is 4,393 feet. Oops. Suddenly I found myself researching “acute altitude sickness” and sending the Vermonters links from the NIH on how to avoid it.
Ever since we hit the loo in Frisco (about 2,000 feet lower in elevation than our hut) on our drive west from Boulder, the thin air and noticeable lack of oxygen had been taking their their toll. Last night, there were headaches and general fatigue, common symptoms when you’re not acclimated. So when Silas emerges like a grinning pyromaniac, all I can think is that I want the Vermonters to keep sleeping. They want to sleep. Sleep could make the difference between a good day and a bad one.
Which is why I signal for Silas to follow me into the kitchen where I prop open the cook stove’s firebox. Together we crumple a mountain of newspaper and then build a small pyre. Then we negotiate over the matches, his hand upon mine as we both try to claim ownership. I’m speaking in a stage whisper and he answers in his bombastic preschooler voice, which gets louder and louder, hastening our arrival at a compromise. I make a cone out of newspaper, light it, hand it over, and Silas thrusts his torch into the firebox. Ignition! He squeals in delight. Twenty minutes later the cabin is toasty warm.
Pre hut trip, if you had asked me whether I planned to teach Boy Scout skills to a kid several years away from cub consideration, you would have gotten one of two answers. The Facebook/Instagram/Twitter-worthy one would have aimed for inspirational with a touch of satisfied (ok, fine: smug) parenting (Nature—life’s best instructor!) and a twist of false humility (anyone can pull together a family reunion hut trip…it’s not that hard). The honest answer would have been significantly more raw, sort of a what is this monster I created??
That’s because pre hut trip I was not thinking about what I might do if Silas awoke before sunrise and threatened to wake everyone up. Instead I was panicking. How would we get 13 people up a seriously rugged Colorado dirt road with only one four-wheel drive between us? What if someone started throwing up because of altitude sickness and couldn’t stop? My mother-in-law’s boyfriend wrapped up cancer treatment last spring; what if his body couldn’t handle the elevation? I worried about how we would coordinate food shopping and cooking meals for such a large crew and fretted that I would somehow get stuck with the bill (a totally baseless fear, by the way).
When I wasn’t perseverating on worst-case scenarios, I was fruitlessly trying to figure out how we would kill that much time at an isolated hut with only a handful of nearby hiking trails. My previous hut trips had all been winter ones before I had kids. We killed time skiing our brains out in endless backcountry stashes. This would obviously not be an option at our August Eiseman hut trip.
When my neurotic thinking came full circle, I projected all of my angst onto the very people who had spent a lot of money and carved out the time to fly to the state that means so much to Jeff and me. That sounded something like this: WTF? They FINALLY come to visit and now we’re all going to get sick in this god-forsaken shack in the middle of the woods???
If you happen to live in Colorado and you have family members who live a plane ride away, you know what I mean by “finally come to visit.” Despite Colorado’s burgeoning tourism industry, it seems that every Centennial State transplant nurses his or her particular grudge with family members in distant locations who rarely, if ever, visit. I know this first-hand. Although I was born in Colorado and my entire family still lives here, my mom wasn’t, and she’s still bitter about the fact that since 1969 she can count on one hand the number of times her brother has flown out to see us.
Still. My irritation was misplaced and unfair. They finally came to visit because we finally invited them. And we sweetened the invitation with the promise of a hut trip—which was my idea all along. If anyone had somehow goofed up with the trip planning, it was me.
This is a good time to talk about hut trips, which, if you’ve lived in Colorado for longer than a week, you’ve been tempted by. A network of 34 lodges located in the valleys and ridges that connect Colorado’s abundant mountains, the 10th Mountain Division huts are so popular there are two annual lotteries to reserve them. Winter visitors brave traveling on technical skis or snowshoes, often traversing avalanche paths and breaking trail for miles. Intrepid travelers link the huts in what are known as hut-to-hut trips, which let them cover huge amounts of ground under their own, non-mechanized power. And in the summer, many of the huts remain open, some of them accessible by rugged Forest Service roads with VW-sized potholes.
It’s worth the effort to get there. The huts are gorgeous—albeit simple—and fully stocked with everything you need, minus your food, clothes, and sleeping bag. The beds have sheets and pillows (though it’s suspect how often the linens are laundered), most huts have rooftop solar panels, all have wood-burning stoves with fuel stacked to Swiss-chalet standards, and some have indoor composting toilets and saunas. They’re flooded with natural light, thanks to a myriad of windows, and they each have stunning mountainous views. And because most lack Internet or cell service, they are the ideal place for a rugged yet pampered escape.
Which is actually what I was thinking about in January when I proposed the hut-trip-as-family-reunion idea. Given our lack of connection—physical, technological, emotional—what better place to immerse ourselves in one another’s company? It didn’t hurt that the huts are extremely affordable; adults cost between $28-30 per night and kids 12 and under are half that.
And then I almost ruined it with my anxiety.
A week before the trip, I declared to Jeff that we should cancel and simply host his family at our home in Boulder. He was adamant: absolutely not. A lifelong skier and adventurer, Jeff is happiest in the high country and was keen to share the hut experience with his family. Thank God for Jeff.
Later that first morning, after Silas’s fire had boiled enough water for pots and pots of coffee, after diving into a divine breakfast of pancakes, sausage, and fresh fruit, and after playing a game of Scrabble and sending all the kids out to throw rocks into the woods, a group of us laced up our hiking shoes and ambled along the ridge behind the hut. It climbed steeply through the forest before breaking into a meadow blanketed with lupine and Indian paintbrush. We pushed on to a rocky outcrop and found ourselves encircled by peaks whose summits were all above treeline. It was sublime. I looked around with the quiet realization that we were all happy and peaceful in one another’s company.
And so went the rest of the trip. No one got dreadfully ill. No one got hurt. We ate, we laughed, and we connected. That was enough.
Photos by Jeff Walker
