Hut, Two, Three, Four
Day 1: Into the Woods

AMC Outdoors, May 2005

Twelve hours earlier, Sarah and I had met at Lafayette Place Campground, just off of I-93, for the 1.75-mile hike to Lonesome Lake. The afternoon was cold and windy, and we were both relieved to have a short day.

I’d spent the previous few weeks planning and wondering. Hiking the huts from one end to another is not exactly common; last year, such traverses made up roughly 1 percent of the 40,000 hut visits from June to September. While I prepared to join those ranks, questions rattled around my brain: Would I last, hiking for a week? Would I miss my ties to “civilization”? Not to mention showering? And could I pull off the logistics?

Rallying Sarah and two other companions to divvy up the week, I’d planned basic routes, figured out where we would park our cars, and bought snacks. I’d done some warm-up hiking (though not nearly enough). I’d picked the brains of family, friends, and co-workers to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything. And now here we were.

The charms of Lonesome are often touted, especially its family-friendly approach and view of Franconia Ridge over the lake. After all the photos I’d seen, I hoped we’d catch the ridge bathed in the oranges and pinks of alpenglow. But there would be no alpenglow. In fact, thanks to the fog, we arrived to find we couldn’t see the ridge at all.

In the warm, octagonal main building, hutmaster Naomi broke away from dinner prep to greet us and direct us to our room. At Lonesome, sleeping quarters are separate from the main lodge (this is also the case at self-service Carter Notch Hut); because our trip was in a “shoulder season”—i.e., not the height of summer—we had a four-bunk room to ourselves. With a front porch and view over the trees toward the lake, the bunkhouse felt much like the rustic fishing camp its builder intended more than a century ago.

After getting settled, my sister and I returned to the main building to pore over the visitor logs, looking for evidence of her long-ago excursions. Decades’ worth of these record books, their entries by turn touching, informative, and silly, burst from the shelves in every hut. They’re useful for family lore, and more. On one page, I read this imprint from 1932: “Hut in good shape.” It hadn’t faded since AMC’s legendary hutmaster, Joe Dodge, grasped his pencil to write it.

All around us, guests talked about the next day’s adventures, played cards, and studied the maps and photos on the walls, while arrivals kept tromping in. Over a hefty dinner of focaccia, salad, and lasagna, we got to know a couple from Vermont, traveling with their 3-year-old and 4-month-old, and a middle-aged couple from Maine who were also hiking all the way to Madison, though on a slightly different schedule. After the “croo” (AMC-speak) of three introduced themselves—like most AMC hut employees, they were ambitious college students hailing from all over the country—we read for a while before calling it a night. By the time the stars emerged, Sarah and I had been gone from our homes for less than 24 hours. But we were already a world away.