There was a lot of apprehension leading up to this hut trip. A three-day, two-hut trip put together by Red to scope out the last third of the Elk Mountain Grand Traverse. The second hut, Goodwin-Greene, had baggage. A notoriously hard hut to find, the Christmas Hut Trip Crew had spent two nights out in the blizzard trying to find the thing, returning with no hut and several dozen frostbitten toes and fingers among them. Jason has a good account of their adventures here.
So when NOAA was predicting another winter storm on the day we were planning on skinning from the Barnard hut to Goodwin-Greene, stress, apprehension, and fear ran high. Armed with two GPS's, we were still more than ready to be able to make the call to turn back after the first night if things looked bad. So we boarded the gondola at Aspen to gain the first 3000 feet of the journey and set off on the first 8 mile skin.
We did not belong in Aspen and it was good to finally get on the trail, even if it was a torn up disaster from far too many snowmachines. Aside from the general frustration and fatigue that accompanies a long skin, the trip in was fairly uneventful and PhD, Chris and I were able to muster the energy for a run down the backyard ski slope. The wind, preceding the storm kept us from more and we retired to the hut.
We woke up to snow. Not a blizzard, not a complete whiteout, but far from ideal conditions for traversing the two by two mile stretch of snow wasteland which was very reminiscent of Planet Hath from StarWars. The GPS's were still picking up signals, Red had been to the hut before, we decided to march under UN Security Council Rules, one person wants to turn back, we all turn back.
It was fairly creepy. The wind intensified as we gained the plateau and visibility was a hundred feet at best. The name of the game was walking a couple hundred feet, getting a GPS reading, reorienting, and walking an other hundred feet before repeating the procedure. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that we would not have found our way without the help of technology, though I can also say that knowing what I knew, I would not have walked out of the cover of trees without the doo-dads. Had they stopped working halfway...I like to think we would have found our way out.
Thrilled to have found the hut, PhD, Chris and I went out skiing, both in search of the stashed wine from the previous trip and powder. We gave up on the first, and found plenty of the latter.
500 yards from the hut, getting ready for the final descent down the bunny hill, the clouds socked in again. We had to pull out the GPS just to make sure we were pointed in the right direction. It's a Burmuda Triangle up there, completely freaky. We were pretty psyched when the storm intensified overnight and both technological innovations stopped working completely. At least we were inside.
More than prepared to stay another night if we couldn't make it out, we waited for it to clear, which it did sometime around mid morning. After the previous days whiteout navigation, the ski out Express Creek to Ashcroft was a walk in the park with some turns thrown in. A taxi ride for $6 per person got us back to Aspen and our cars where we pointed ourselves east and headed home. Bittersweet as always.
It was a funny hut trip. A lot (and by a lot, I mean a lot) of skinning, not terribly many turns, and more relief than elation when we found each of the huts. I've wanted to do a hut to hut loop since I was first introduced to the concept of hut trips, and now I can say that going to a single hut for several days is a much better use of time if you're going to haul downhill gear in. That being said, I'd love to score some sort of touring setup like Red had and do long multi-day traverses either camping or with huts in the future. Something about covering a lot of distance really appeals to me...but then again, I am a bit of an odd one.