Huts and glory: Mountain hospitality in the Whites
AMC Outdoors, July/August 2000
Evening at any hut. The night grows chilly. Your legs throb from the day's hike, your lids start to droop. But then odors from the kitchen begin to waft: lasagna, turkey and stuffing, hot homemade bread. While it may seem like a miracle that food makes it to the huts at all, the real miracle lies in its transformation into abundant, delectable meals—and not a prune in sight. You feast, you take seconds of the apple brown betty; then you wash up, climb into a bunk, and wrap your weary body in a thick wool blanket.
Tireless hut crews, often not far out of their teens, must also be maitre d', maid, handyman, and chef. With limited ingredients and only the most basic of tools, cooking at the huts requires ingenuity and culinary skill. Making sure all those guests have enough to eat is not always easy. In his first year at Lakes of the Clouds in 1974, Joe Gill, now a White Mountain National Forest administrator, peered out from the kitchen one evening to see 90 hungry people and knew he had only enough fish for 40. He made do under very difficult circumstances—by deliberately burning the fish. It worked: The guests had all they wanted to eat, and there was even some left over.
When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas visited the huts in 1959 for a National Geographic article he was writing, hut crews were on full alert. Years later, Chuck Kellogg, hutmaster at Lakes, recalled keeping dozens of hungry hikers at bay with cold water and bread and holding the ovens on idle waiting for the tardy, famous guest to arrive. But like so many hikers over the years, the judge saw only the end result of Kellogg's efforts:
It is always a joy to me to watch the hungry eyes of a camp group—perhaps 20 to 50 youngsters—following the motions of a hutman carving a turkey. The aroma of a crisp, brown bird, bubbling soup, and hot biscuits seems magically to take the ache out of tired feet.
Ample platters of food—twice a day, every day—all summer long. How do they do it? AMC's North Country logistics manager organizes food delivery to the huts, and offered a few examples from her records of the staples she provides each season: 200 pounds of baker's chocolate; 200 pounds of baking powder; 750 cans of black beans; 600 pounds of chocolate chips; 1,500 pounds of coffee; 62 cases of Cream of Wheat; 10,000 pounds of flour; 2,400 pounds of white sugar; 94 cases of cocoa; 165 cases of juice concentrate; 60 cases of lemonade; 200 pounds of parmesan cheese; and 350 cases of eggs.
Huts and Glory, main article | A considerable undertaking | Pack it in, pack it in |
Mountain hospitality in the Whites | Years of connection and change
