A Healthy Mix

While a hut guest from the 1930s would still recognize the basic elements of an overnight stay today—including bunk rooms, wool blankets, and family-style meals served by a college-age crew—there are some obvious differences. Most notably in the demographics of both fellow guests and crew. “The hut clientele in the days of old were guys out roughing it and sleeping in stacks of bunks all in one room, and usually single sex, because we didn’t have kids and women coming,” says Thayer. “That has changed greatly over the years.”

Today, far from being male-dominated, the huts attract a healthy mix of men and women, young and old, as well as both experienced outdoors people and those on their first foray into the woods. In fact, it’s not unusual to have a couple of Appalachian Trail thru-hikers seated next to a young family taking their children on their first visit to the White Mountains. This mixture of people, says Kautz, is one of the biggest lures to the huts. “People who come to the huts are social people who like to have the solitude they get on their hikes, but at the end of the day like sitting at the table and meeting other hikers over dinner,” he says.

The makeup of the crews has changed as much as the clientele. “It was something of a male club,” recalls William Barrett, who worked in a variety of huts in the 1960s and is still active in the Old Hutmans Association, an organization of former hut staffers. No surprise, recalls Barrett, that a culture of machismo grew out of the young male monopoly on crew positions. This revolved around such things as who could carry the biggest load of supplies from the valley to the huts on what were, and are still, known as packing days. To Barrett, the macho culture of all-male crews could occasionally lead to less than stellar hospitality. “Some people, not a lot, were rude to guests and regarded them as intruders,” he says. By the 1970s, though, women became crewmembers and today there is a roughly even split between the sexes. This fall, however, every single hutmaster was female along with between 60 and 70 percent of the crews.

Barrett is quick to point out that the inclusion of women has been a boon to the overall guest experience at the huts. During his tenure on the crew, he says, people were chosen more for their ability to pack heavy loads rather than for their overall skill at operating a hospitable hut and educating visitors about the natural world. Today, crewmembers come from all around the country—rather than mostly New England, as in the past—and many are studying subjects like geology and forest ecology, which better equips them as educators. “People now are much more well-rounded than we were,” he says.

The previous 100-plus years have seen an evolution in the physical structures of the huts as well. The original Madison Spring Hut, built for about $700, was a spartan stone building with hard wooden bunks lined with fir boughs to create a mattress. Other accoutrements included cooking utensils and an ax for people to cut the wood they would need to fuel the stove.

Subsequent construction of huts at Carter Notch in 1914, Lakes of the Clouds in 1915 and, later, Galehead and Greenleaf in the west was approached in an equally utilitarian manner. Over the past few decades, though, there have been renovations and reconstructions completed on a number of huts, all of which have focused on increasing the comfort level of guests. As Thayer points out, improvements have run the gamut from new, thicker mattresses to improved living and common areas to dividing what were large, single bunkrooms into smaller, more numerous sleeping rooms to accommodate groups traveling together.

An Expanded Mission

Not all the improvements have focused on comfort. There has been a steadily increasing emphasis over the past decade or so on the value of using the huts as model environmental education hubs, illustrating the wise use of resources and the importance of conservation. “Places like the huts are in unique settings and we have the opportunity to not only practice what we preach in those settings but also to showcase what is possible for folks after they leave,” says Kautz. “Central to AMC’s mission is an effort to get people involved in conservation through their recreational experiences.”

To that end, AMC has dramatically revamped how the huts operate in order to “live lightly on the land,” as Thayer puts it. Take how power is generated for lighting and refrigeration as an example. In the past, propane gas had to be flown or packed in to keep the lights on and food cold. Today, thanks to investments in photovoltaic panels, solar power is used at each of the huts, greatly reducing the amount of propane needed. In addition, says Thayer, wind power is utilized at Lakes of the Clouds, Greenleaf, and Carter Notch huts while hydroelectric power is generated using the falls at Zealand Falls.

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