A Hut-Warming Experience 

Everyone loves New England’s natural beauty, but sometimes enough is enough—the wind is howling, the snow is driving, and all we want to be is somewhere warm.  But hearty natives don’t decamp for Florida; they just find themselves a nice little hut.

Desperate to survive their first winter, some of the earliest settlers in Salem, Massachusetts, hastily put up three-sided log huts dug into hillsides. These sufficed, but were by all accounts miserable places to pass a chilly night. It would take a few centuries until folks actually wanted to venture into the cold for recreation, but when they did, they built themselves shelters to make the adventure more enjoyable, not to mention safer.  From skating-pond lean-tos with fireplaces to defrost icy toes to snug mountaintop cabins that can save a hiker’s life, New England’s simple huts are charming reminders of what was once called “the sporting life.”

Perhaps the most famous string of huts in America, the eight maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club in New Hampshire’s White Mountains got their start as a system of shelter in the wake of a horrible accident. The club was founded at MIT (then in Boston) in 1876, to “explore the mountains of New England and adjacent regions, both for scientific and artistic purposes,” and members built a simple stone hut in the saddle between Mounts Madison and Adams in 1888. But when two climbers started up Mount Washington on June 30, 1900, to attend the annual AMC meeting at the Summit House hotel, a summer storm was brewing and that lone hut was nowhere near them.  Both were in excellent shape (one was a founder of the New York Athletic Club), but with no refuge available, neither could survive the hurricane-force winds and sleet that hit that afternoon; the storm lasted 60 hours.  As a tribute to the men, the club erected a wooden hut not far from where they died.  Rebuilt in stone in 1915, with many tons of materials carried up the mountain by the construction crew, the Lakes of the Clouds hut is now the flagship of the AMC shelter system, with each hut within a day’s hike from the next.

It doesn’t take a 60-hour tempest to make a body yearn for some heat.  New England skaters have long been able to glide off the ice and into pondside huts, where a roaring fire thaws their outsides and hot chocolate (or something stronger) warms their insides.  One of the most comfortable around is the Norwegian-style clubhouse of the Cambridge Skating Club, built in 1930 and fronting on five flooded and frozen tennis courts. Inside is a magnificent lofted great room in dark-stained wood, with an upper gallery, the requisite massive stone fireplace, bathrooms, and a kitchen that constantly puts out fresh hot chocolate-chip cookies. Members--Cambridge residents who have to be proposed by other members—are hardly roughing it here. 

In nearby Weston, however, a remarkable restoration project has brought back a hut that’s as rustic as its first owner intended it to be.  Robert Winsor headed up Kidder, Peabody & Co., the securities firm, and was thus able to put together a 472-acre suburban estate called Chestnut Farm, where in 1910 he hired the Olmstead Brothers landscape architecture firm to create a natural setting that included a four-acre skating pond with a three-sided log structure.  There, next to the fire, “Mrs. Winsor sat in front of a table, serving hot coffee and tea to the grown-ups and marshmallows and cocoa to the children,” according to a diarist of the time. A few years back, the current owner hired environmental consultant and builder Dave Burke and Cambridge architect Colin Flavin to completely reconstruct the collapsing original, which they did, using locally harvested pine logs and preserving the fireplace. “One day a nephew of Robert Winsor showed up,” says Burke, “because he’d heard what we were doing. The guy started crying tears of joy when he saw the new place.”

With hikers and skaters covered (as it were), the next group of outdoor enthusiasts needing protection is the skiers.  Perhaps the most stunning spot for them is the Stone Hut, tucked in the wind-blasted firs atop Mount Mansfield, the highest peak in Vermont and home of Stowe Mountain Resort.  The Civilian Conservation Corps, whose crews cut many of the mountain’s original ski trails, built the hut with native stones and a wood roof in 1936.  Today the hut still has no electricity or running water, but its wood-burning stove gets a little help from the two-inch layer of rigid insulation added in a 2000 renovation.  It holds up to 12 people and, through an annual lottery, it’s booked most winter nights.

Along somewhat less beaten paths, the New England woods remain inviting for hikers, snowshoers, and cross-country skiers, thanks to trail and hut systems maintained by organizations as old as the Dartmouth Outing Club (founded in 1909) and as new as Maine Huts & Trails (2001).  The DOC began its network with a single mountainside cabin built less than 10 miles from Hanover; today members maintain about 75 miles of the Appalachian Trail and seven cabins (ranging from a one-roomer with some bunk beds to a lodge with electricity and hot showers) that are open to the public. Maine Huts & Trails is an ongoing project that provides access to the state’s western backcountry, with four state-of-the-art “boutique hostels” strung along a 50-mile trail. Home-cooked meals, beer and wine service, and comfortable beds take the edge off long treks in the wilderness--and redefine what “a nice little hut” can be.

Perhaps not to be outdone, the AMC completely rebuilt its Madison Spring Hut about a decade ago, on the same site of its first 1888 stone cabin, adding a wing and renovating the original cabin to LEED standards.  The job required over 100 helicopter deliveries of construction materials, carefully loaded in 1600-pound lifts and delivered between bouts of mountain weather with military precision. There may be an arms race developing in New England’s hinterlands, and lovers of the outdoors stand to be the winners.