Huts and glory: A considerable undertaking

AMC Outdoors, July/August 2000

It all started on a blustery day in 1888 at the hotel on Mount Washington's peak, the Summit House. At an AMC field meeting, young Charles Newhall sat at the feet of his uncle, member Cheever Newhall, "watching the floor carpet lift up with the gusts of wind and listening in on all of the arguments about a hut on the northern peaks," he later wrote in Appalachia. What the speakers were proposing to do was, noted one, "the most considerable single undertaking on which the Club [founded 12 years earlier] has yet ventured."

To provide both a base for exploration for the ever expanding ranks of trampers, and "refuge to any persons who might be caught on the mountain in a storm or overtaken by night," the club decided to build a hut in New Hampshire's White Mountains. The small stone structure, built on the Madison-Adams col later that year, had one door and two windows. Beyond basic construction, its $770 price tag included a table and chairs, bunks for 12, a stove, an ax, cooking utensils, and candlesticks.

Plenty of hikers took advantage of this new mountain refuge. One party slipped into the hut to escape a torrential rain. "We crowded in, standing about the stove in our wet clothes, eating luncheon out of half-soaked boxes," Zilpha Smith wrote in Appalachia in 1894. Later, Smith found herself a bunk "freshly filled with balsam tips, deliciously soft and sweet. I was never more comfortable, nor more wide-awake." Smith's party survived "roughing it" in fine form. "Our fellow-members at the Summit House were pitying us; but we in turn pitied them, shut up in a hotel with nothing to do!"

Delightful as Smith found it, the hut experience was not as pure as its creators intended. Almost immediately, the hut suffered from overcrowding and vandalism. In response, the AMC posted rules for hut use at local hotels, including group-size recommendations (three to four in a party) and guidelines for who should yield to whom (after one night in the hut, bunkers were expected to give their space to newcomers). In 1906, the club voted to enlarge the hut, and—in a move that would permanently alter the hut experience—added a summer caretaker.

The popularity of the hut, and the continuing danger posed to trampers by the White Mountains' notoriously foul and fickle weather, led the AMC to decide in 1909 that "it will be of great advantage to the community if a few additional huts shall be constructed, with good paths thereto." Carter Notch, below Wildcat Mountain, and Lakes of the Clouds, on Mount Washington, came along in 1914 and 1915, respectively. At the base of Washington, the AMC built a hut at Pinkham Notch in 1920 to serve as a headquarters for the growing system. Then, in 1922, a young man who'd agreed to take on the duties of Pinkham hutmaster came sputtering up the hill in a Model T Ford. That man was Joe Dodge.

After a few summer seasons, Dodge recalled to his biographer, William Lowell Putnam, the Hut Committee wrote in 1926 and asked if he would keep Pinkham open all winter "and patrol around the other huts every so often? Of course I said yes, and . . . I threw the key away. We've never closed the doors since."

During Dodge's 31 years as hut manager, this dashing, high-school educated, smart-mouthed man built Greenleaf, Galehead, and Zealand huts; co-founded the Mount Washington Observatory; and seems to have forever impressed himself into the memory of all who met him. "Though he knows only 2,000 visitors by name or face, friends estimate that 250,000 Easterners are acquainted with him," wrote the Saturday Evening Post in 1949.

Dodge convinced his young wife, Teen, to embark on a new life in the wilds of Pinkham Notch, and they saw innumerable changes come to the huts. Dodge mourned in 1940, when Madison Hut burned down, but quickly set to rebuilding it; he brought electricity to the huts; and as time went on, he navigated the changing guard of the White Mountains when the state, the AMC, and the Forest Service imposed a level of oversight unheard of in his early days. Joe Dodge expected the most from his employees, and he raised the bar high. As for his legacy, an entry in the observatory's logbook on Oct. 28, 1973, may say it best: "The Observatory, the whole North Country, will never be as it was: Joe Dodge died today."

 Huts and Glory, main article  |  A considerable undertaking  |  Pack it in, pack it in  | 
Mountain hospitality in the Whites  |  Years of connection and change