AMC Outdoors, November 2007
AMC caretakers relish winters without running water—or a thermostat.
By mid-morning on a Sunday in late March 2007, most of the hikers had packed their snowshoes, poles, and other gear and abandoned Carter Notch Hut, leaving caretaker Sean Auclair with the usual end-of-weekend duties: stacking dishes, cleaning bathrooms, and tidying the hut, the oldest building in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s system. But the lanky, scruffy-bearded Auclair, a 24-year-old with a degree in natural resources management from Cornell University, decided to steal a few minutes in his bunk to read before diving into his chores. It had been a busy weekend. Carter Notch Hut and the bunkhouses, which can host 40 people overnight, had been crowded with about 30 hikers cooking breakfast and dinner, washing dishes, and playing Scrabble.
Shortly after the last of the hikers headed out, Auclair’s reading was interrupted by a breathless Boy Scout. The Scout had rushed back to report that a young man had accidentally cut his hand, just a few tenths of a mile down the trail. The man’s pant leg had kept catching on his crampon, and when he tried to trim his trousers with a knife, he slit his hand.
Auclair sprang to action, grabbing bandages, his radio, and hiking gear, and heading for the trail. Within minutes he found the young man, whose hand had been examined and bandaged by a doctor in the group. Auclair escorted the group to the trailhead, where they left for a nearby hospital.
“It was just a typical weekend until that happened,” says Auclair, who, like all winter caretakers, has Wilderness First Aid training. “I spent the better part of the day hiking them down and making my way back up. I wanted to make sure he was OK. But my role really ended at the trailhead.”
The young man was indeed OK, and emergencies such as this tend to be rare for Auclair and his fellow winter hut caretakers, a small group who work at three self-service AMC huts in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. While fewer hikers are out in the winter, the huts at Lonesome Lake, Zealand Falls, and Carter Notch draw their fair share of weekenders and occasional weekday visitors. The huts are also destinations for school groups, Scouts, and AMC excursions. These rustic cabins are usually booked full on Saturday nights.
Each hut has two bunkhouses with nothing more than mattresses and pillows for overnight guests. They sleep from 36 to 48 people total in separate bunkrooms. Each hut also has kitchen facilities and a wood-burning stove in the main building to ease the evening cold, but guests still need their winter bags in the unheated bunk rooms.
Perhaps the most noteworthy hut is Carter Notch, originally a log cabin shelter built in 1904 and reconstructed as a hut a decade later (its stone design was modeled after Madison Spring Hut). The easternmost stop in the hut system, Carter Notch sits beneath 4,832-foot Carter Dome on a slight rise above a lake. Some AMC caretakers say it is haunted by the ghost of a former hut manager, “Red Mac” MacGregor, who reportedly pulls pranks on the hut crew.
Carter and its sister huts are each staffed by two caretakers working alternating shifts—several days on, a few days off. For the most part, their job is to maintain the hut, bunkhouses, and bathrooms. They’re also there to check guests in and out and oversee use of the kitchen. Getting to work means a winter hike to the hut, carrying a pack that can weigh 60 pounds when filled with clothing and a week’s supply or more of food and other necessities.
Most winter caretakers have previously worked at AMC’s full-service huts during the summer and fall and clamor for the opportunity to spend the winter in the woods. Typically, AMC receives double the number of applicants for the six winter slots.
Caretakers are in their early 20s and a year or two out of college. About half are men and half women, though years ago caretakers were all men. Like Auclair, most caretakers hail from the Northeast.
The job requires the ability to endure cold—temperatures outside often drop to the single digits—and solitude, with little human interaction for several days at a stretch. But caretakers also act as ambassadors, welcoming guests who come and stay at the hut.
“It’s really a unique job,” says Eric Pedersen, AMC’s hut manager. “You spend a lot of time living in isolation. You have busy weekends with lots of guests passing through and then you won’t see anybody for four or five days. You have to expect to have days when it’s very cold, be independent, and find jobs to do to keep yourself busy and warm.”
For Adam Brown, caretaking offered an opportunity to spend more time in the backcountry. The 27-year-old had just graduated from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania with a master’s degree in park and resource management, and after spending three summers as a backcountry shelter caretaker at Garfield Ridge, in New Hampshire, he still wanted more time in the wilderness. He spent his first season at Zealand Falls and his second, the winter of 2007, at Carter Notch.
“The chance to be out in the wintertime is kind of rare, and to get paid for it,” says Brown, now a trail resource manager in New England for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. “The solitude appealed to me quite a bit—how often can you go several days and not see anybody? And you’re in this beautiful environment. The quiet really adds to the beauty of the place.”
Brown awakened each day to the radio weather report from Mount Washington. He’d rise and immediately write down the weather forecast. Around 8 a.m., he’d check in by radio with AMC staff at Pinkham Notch Visitor Center to find out how many, if any, guests were expected at the hut that day. The radio was his only means of communication with the outside world. Some days, the exchange was just a matter of “things are fine,” and that was it.
Between the morning and afternoon chores, caretakers like Brown hike, snowshoe, or spend a lot of time reading. Brown also had a hand-cranked radio so he could listen to National Public Radio and A Prairie Home Companion on Sundays.
“In the afternoon, I would eat lunch, go for a hike, have some free time for a few hours,” he says. “I would get out as soon as I could and go for a walk or go snowshoeing. I read a lot. I tried to stay warm—that takes a lot of energy, doing pull-ups or push-ups. You figure out ways to entertain yourself and keep your mind occupied.”
That changes on weekends. “When there’s a full house, it can get really hectic in the kitchen,” says Megan Norris, a 24-year-old Connecticut native who was a caretaker at Lonesome Lake Hut this past winter. “When you have 48 people in groups of twos and threes shuffling out of the kitchen, it’s crazy. You have to make a schedule so everyone can cook. You have to make sure they have enough water and that they wash the dishes. “But when you have a slow night with two or three people, it’s fun to cook with them,” she says. “I normally have a ton of food. I missed serving people from my days at the full-service hut. Having people to dine with in the hut makes it an event.”
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