10th Mountain Division Hut Trips

For a stretch of years when our kids were younger, our family rented a 10th Mountain Division hut every winter. Sometimes with friends, sometimes just the four of us. We'd put in for the lottery a year out, mark the dates on the calendar, and start counting down. The huts were the highlight of our winter, bigger than Christmas, bigger than spring break, bigger than the first powder day. The hut trip was the thing.

This guide is what we wish we'd had before our first one.

What the 10th Mountain Division Huts Actually Are

The 10th Mountain Division Hut Association maintains 35 backcountry huts scattered across the central Colorado Rockies between Aspen, Leadville, Vail, and Breckenridge. They're not luxury cabins. They're small, well-built shelters at altitude, sleeping anywhere from six to sixteen people, with a wood stove, a kitchen with propane burners, a sleeping loft or bunks, and an outhouse. No electricity. No running water, you melt snow on the stove. You bring your own food, bedding (sleeping bags, sometimes sheets if you're soft), headlamps, and everything else.

The huts are named for members of the 10th Mountain Division, the World War II alpine combat unit that trained at Camp Hale near Leadville. The association was founded in 1980 by Fritz Benedict, an architect and 10th Mountain veteran who came back from Europe wanting to build something that would carry the spirit of the division forward. The first two huts went up in 1982. There are now huts named for soldiers, civilians who shaped Colorado mountain culture, and family members of veterans.

The system is run by lottery. You apply almost a year in advance for the dates you want. Popular weekends, Presidents' Day, MLK Day, the holidays, are wildly oversubscribed. Less popular dates and less popular huts are easier to get. If you don't draw on the first try, you keep applying. Eventually you get in.

Getting There

The shortest hut approach is about three miles. The longest is about ten. Most are five to seven. The catch is that you're climbing at altitude, most of the huts sit between 10,500 and 11,500 feet, and you're hauling everything you need for the weekend on your back or in a pulk (a small sled you tow behind you).

The gear:

• Skis or splitboard. Three options for how you travel uphill on snow: alpine touring (AT) setups, which look like regular ski boots and bindings but the heel releases for the climb; telemark setups, which always have a free heel; or splitboards, which are snowboards that separate into two skis for the climb and reassemble at the top.
• Climbing skins. Strips of synthetic mohair that stick to the base of your skis and provide grip for the uphill. You strip them off at the top and put them in your pack for the ski down.
• Pulks for hauling food, water, and gear. Heavy loads ride in the pulk so they're not on your back.
• A real backpack, not a day pack. Forty to sixty liters depending on the trip length and the weather.
• Avalanche gear. Transceiver, probe, shovel. Required equipment on most hut approaches.

The skin uphill is its own discipline. Skinning is steady, slow, rhythmic. You sweat. Then at the top of the climb, you stop to strip the skins off, and the moment you stop, the sweat freezes. Gloves come off to peel sticky skins. Hands get cold. Skins go in the pack. Gloves go back on. Down jacket goes on. Then you ski down, and now you're cold from the sweat and you're moving fast through cold air. This is the transition every hut trip teaches you about by the second day. Skiers who've done a lot of skinning get fast at it. Bring spare gloves.

The Huts We've DoneIn roughly this order

Here's the rundown of the trips we ran with our kids when they were younger.

Uncle Bud's Hut

February 2014 · Senna was 12, Enzo was 9

Uncle Bud's was our first. The hut is named for "Bud" Winter, killed in action in Italy in 1945 at age 20. The Winters were a New York family, Bud grew up ski racing back east and traveled to Camp Hale just out of high school to join the 10th Mountain Division. He was the youngest man in the division's 10th Reconnaissance Troop. The hut sits at 11,380 feet up above Turquoise Lake outside Leadville, and the approach is around six miles up the historic Trooper Traverse route, the same route 10th Mountain soldiers used in training.

The story of how Bud Winter died is worth knowing before you sleep in the hut named for him. In northern Italy, his sergeant prepared to advance forward alone to direct fire. Bud kept him back. "No, you stay here. I'm going to go, you have a wife and kids." He was killed by enemy fire moving forward, two weeks before the war ended. He was awarded a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. After the war, the sergeant traveled to New York to thank Winter's parents in person. Bud's father wrote a poem for him called Silver Skis. It's displayed in calligraphy on a wall of the hut.

We took our friend Kenny and his son with us. Six miles isn't far on a flat trail, but six miles uphill at 10,000-plus feet with a forty-pound pack is something else entirely. Enzo at 9 was the smallest in the group, and somewhere in the last mile he bonked, that backcountry word for when your body stops cooperating, your blood sugar tanks, your legs turn into stilts. We sat him down on a log, fed him a Snickers bar, drank some water, and waited. Fifteen minutes later he stood up and walked the rest of the way. That's a lesson kids learn on hut trips that's hard to teach any other way: your body will do what you need it to do, but it has limits, and you have to listen to them.

That first night at Uncle Bud's set the template for every hut dinner that followed. Eight or ten people around a long wooden table inside a warm hut that you spent all day climbing to. Pasta with sauce from a jar, salad you somehow carried up, wine someone hauled up that was definitely too heavy to be reasonable. Outside, the stars looked fake, the kind of sky you forget exists until you're at 11,400 feet with no light pollution for thirty miles.

10th Mountain Division Hut

The next year · Senna was 13, Enzo was 10

This is the namesake hut for the whole system, and it sits high in the woods near Tennessee Pass. The approach is about five miles. Senna and Enzo were now veterans. We came with eight families, and out of all the kids on the trip, Enzo was the only boy. Eight girls and Enzo. He took it well.

The fact about this hut that still surprises people: it has a connection to Bill Bowerman, the legendary University of Oregon track coach who co-founded Nike. Bowerman served as a major and battalion commander in the 10th Mountain Division during the war. He famously poured urethane into his wife's waffle iron after returning home, and the resulting sole became the Nike Waffle Trainer, the shoe that helped launch the company. There's a man who fought in the Italian Apennines, came home, and accidentally invented the running shoe.

A storm rolled in on our second day at the 10th Mountain Hut. We let the kids out and they built a snow cave that Enzo crawled into and refused to come out of for an hour. That's the rhythm a hut trip teaches: day one you arrive, day two the weather does what it does and you adapt, day three you clean up and ski out. By day three, everyone has fallen into a rhythm, coffee on the stove, fire going, somebody melting snow for water, somebody sweeping the floor. Cleaning is part of the trip. No cleaners are coming. The next family arrives the day after you leave, and they should walk into the hut you wish you'd walked into.

Margy's Hut

One summer

Margy's is one of the rare drivable huts. You can get most of the way to it on a forest road in summer, then walk the last short bit. We did it as a summer trip, which felt like cheating, a hut trip without the climb, but it was actually a great way to introduce younger nieces and nephews to the hut system without the difficulty of a winter skin-up.

The hut is named for Margaret "Margy" McNamara, in memory of her by her husband Robert McNamara, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense. Margy was a children's literacy advocate who founded Reading Is Fundamental in 1966, the largest children's literacy nonprofit in the country. Margy's was built in 1982 along with the McNamara Hut, the first two huts in the entire 10th Mountain system. The hut sits in a meadow at about 11,300 feet up above Lenado, near Aspen.

The thing nobody tells you about Margy's in summer is that there's an active cattle grazing lease on the surrounding land. We walked up from the road and got to the meadow around dusk to find about thirty head of cattle hanging out essentially in the front yard. Senna and Enzo were small. The cattle were huge. We did what every family does, went inside, closed the door, and watched them through the window like they were aliens. They wandered off eventually. The kids fed them blades of grass through the fence by morning.

The next day we hiked to a small alpine lake above the hut. That was Margy's, easier than the winter trips, slower paced, but no less of a real hut experience.

A Word About What You're Actually Doing Out There

We took our kids on these trips because we wanted them to know what it's like to be uncomfortable, to be tired, to be cold, and to discover that they could keep going anyway. You can read books about that. You can listen to lectures about resilience. But there's no substitute for being eight years old, two miles into a five-mile skin-up, with the sun going down, and realizing that the only way out is forward. That's a different kind of learning than you get at school.

It was also about a particular kind of Colorado history. The 10th Mountain Division trained at Camp Hale, between Vail and Leadville, in the early 1940s. They learned to ski, climb, and survive in the mountains so they could fight at altitude in Italy. After the war, the survivors came home and built the modern American ski industry. Pete Seibert, who fought at Riva Ridge, founded Vail. Friedl Pfeifer, also a 10th Mountain veteran, helped develop Aspen. Larry Jump founded Arapahoe Basin. These men came back from a war and built the mountain culture that the rest of us now live in. The huts are not just shelters. They're a memorial.

Janet's HutA first-person account by Senna

The next section was written by our daughter Senna, who at the time of this trip was a sophomore at Vail Christian High School. She climbed on the Battle Mountain team, Vail Christian was small enough that several sports were combined with Battle Mountain. She's now in her early 20s, working on a wildland fire helicopter crew during summer fire season and ski patrolling in the winter. We're putting her words on the page exactly as she wrote them.

Before her account, the back story that sets it up.

The year before this trip, I had taken Senna and Enzo to New Hampshire to ski Tuckerman Ravine on the side of Mount Washington. Tuckerman is a steep snowfield, a headwall really, a steep bowl that you climb up on foot and ski down. I had been a snowmaker at the mountain when I was in college. The first time I went up Tuckerman as a young guy, looking up from the bottom, the headwall looked impossibly steep. I clicked into my skis about halfway up the climb, panicked, and skied back down to the bottom. Then I caught my breath, climbed the whole thing properly, and skied it clean.

The thing that looks impossible from the bottom is often just steep. You climb it and you find out.

The Other 10th Mountain HutsA short directory

There are 35 huts in the 10th Mountain system, scattered between Aspen, Leadville, Vail, and Breckenridge. We've done the four above, plus a few that aren't in this article yet. Here's a quick guide to the ones we know about, with the people they're named for.

• Eiseman Hut, Sleeps 16. Approach from the Vail area. Named for Burt and Hannelore Eiseman, longtime Colorado outdoor advocates.
• Fowler-Hilliard Hut, Sits near Resolution Mountain. Named for Bill Fowler and Hill Hilliard, two 10th Mountain Division veterans.
• Jackal Hut, South of Tennessee Pass. Named for the nickname of John Jay, a 10th Mountain veteran and filmmaker who documented the unit.
• Peter Estin Hut, Near New York Mountain. Named for Peter Estin, a former association leader.
• McNamara Hut, Near Hunter Creek above Aspen. Built in 1982 along with Margy's, also as a memorial to Margy McNamara.
• Fritz and Fabi Benedict Huts, Above Aspen. Built in 1997, named for Fritz Benedict, the architect and 10th Mountain veteran who founded the hut association, and his wife Fabi.
• Skinner Hut, Above Turquoise Lake outside Leadville. Named for Sergeant Edward Skinner, killed in Italy.
• Betty Bear Hut, Off Hagerman Pass. Named for Betty Bear, an early hut supporter.
• Sangree M. Froelicher Hut, Near Lake County. Named for Sangree Froelicher, killed in Italy.
• Harry Gates Hut, Near Aspen. Named for Harry Gates, an early association supporter.
• Polar Star Inn, Near New York Mountain. Larger and more amenity-rich; almost a small lodge.