Trail-Ridge Taverns : Lofty strings of Appalachian huts reward hikers after long, grimy days

I am no Jolly (ho, ho, ho) Green Giant, but I must say this is the best frozen niblet corn I’ve ever had. Just don’t ask me what it tastes like. I’m using the 2-pound bag as an emergency ice pack, proving once again that improvisational skills come in just as handy on vacation as they do on any comedy club stage.

I brought my twisted right knee (recent softball injury) with me to New Hampshire’s deceptively rugged White Mountains. After two days of hiking a landscape that has enough boulders to occupy a thousand chain gangs, I move like an old nag. The much-needed first-aid corn comes courtesy of the Appalachian Mountain Club, which operates a network of eight European-style huts scattered throughout this 770,000-acre national forest. My friend Martha and I are staying tonight at Lakes of the Clouds Hut, a high-altitude oasis that can feed and sleep nearly 100 people. There’s no ice machine on site. But there is a generator that produces enough juice to run a refrigerator, which, thankfully, is well stocked with frozen veggies. Sometimes strained ligaments are the mother of invention.

God bless these low-slung, wood-and-stone shelters spaced seven to eight miles apart. What a joy at the end of a long, grimy day to rest your weary head under a roof, to be warm and dry and in the company of flush toilets, running water and a kitchen staff that whips up splendid full-course meals.

Which is exactly why we came here. I don’t want to tote a full pack on a gimpy leg. Furthermore, Martha is a back-country neophyte who believes the Drug Enforcement Agency should declare dirt a controlled substance. I figured a three-day, hut-to-hut ramble, with someone else cooking, would be a perfect way to introduce her to the simple pleasures of hiking.

I may have figured wrong.

Right about now Martha has a sneaky suspicion that I took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on her and, once she collapses in a dead-as-a-doornail hypothermic heap, I’ll jet off to the Bahamas and open a funky beach bar called “The Sole Beneficiary.” Today we spent 10 hours on the trail, scrambling up two 5,700-foot summits (Mt. Adams and Mt. Jefferson), then picking our way through several hours of soupy fog before finally bumping into Lakes of the Clouds.

Yesterday we parked my car outside the town of Randolph and hiked in from the trail head to our first overnight stop: Madison Spring Hut. Martha lagged a bit behind, dawdling over the babbling brook and wildflowers. At least that’s what she said she was doing. Only later, after we had stowed our gear in the communal bunk room, did she reveal she’d been pausing to quietly shed a few tears over the fine mess I’d gotten her into: long uphill climbs and no escalators in sight, sore back, sweat-stained shirts. Plus dirt!

The Appalachian Trail winds through a portion of the White Mountains as it meanders from Georgia to Maine. The route passes over some of the same ground we’re covering. At dinner that first night, one of our fellow hut guests asked Martha if she has aspirations of someday tackling the mother of all trails. “Sure,” she chirped, firing a wise-girl look my way, “if I ever get off this mountain.”

I plead guilty. I made the classic mistake of not checking the lay of the land beforehand. Years ago I backpacked a southern stretch of the White Mountains and remembered it as being quite hiker-friendly. It still is. But we’re doing the northern end this trip, passing through the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Mt. Washington, highest point in all New England (at just a hair under 6,300 feet) and host to the most wicked weather this side of the Yukon.

To my surprise, and to Martha’s dismay, the prevailing terrain turned out to be almost Mars-like. For hours on end we step, leap and tippy-toe from jumbo rock to jumbo rock, rarely touching the ground. This kind of hiking taxes one’s balance and concentration. Not exactly beginner-level stuff. We move at a slowpoke pace, like soldiers crossing a very scenic minefield.

“Boy, this isn’t what I expected at all,” I keep repeating.

Martha’s good-sport attitude eventually gets me off the hook. Once the initial shock wears off, she has little difficulty scrambling up steep rock faces. Coming down is another matter. “I used to ask my mother if she dropped me on my head when I was a baby,” Martha says at one point, noting that she wobbles like a tipsy New Year’s Eve celebrant when navigating any surface more challenging than a city sidewalk. Hoping to avoid carrying her home, I quickly surrender my walking stick.

Silhouetted against the sky, the lumpy peaks of the White Mountains resemble a pack of contented hounds curled up before a fire. The vistas lack the soaring, saw-toothed splendor of Colorado or Utah, but they are spectacular in their own right. According to one 19th century guidebook, the White Mountains were named from afar by sailors plying the Atlantic Ocean, “to whom they were a landmark and a mystery lifting their crowns of brilliant snow against the blue sky from October until June.”

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Camping is permitted in designated areas of the forest, but the huts offer three distinct advantages. First and foremost is the delicious freedom of traveling light. Secondly, the college-age hut crews rustle up darn good grub. One of our typical dinners featured fresh-baked challah bread, tossed salad, fresh green beans, tomato-rice soup, pasta and homemade “strawberry-in-the-middle” butter cookies. Bye, bye baked beans. Hello second helpings.

The huts also function as the corner taverns of the high country. Each has a large dining area with long picnic-type tables and benches. After dinner the backgammon boards, trail maps and wrinkled paperbacks come out. Coffee and tea flows. Tongues begin to wag. We literally crossed paths with George and Diane Pomeroy, husband-and-wife ministers from a nearby village, on top of Mt. Adams. We exchanged hellos, but it wasn’t until we met again at Lakes of the Clouds that we had a chance to talk at length.

I wake up shortly after sunrise at Lakes of the Clouds, and the first sound I hear is a woman in a nearby bunk telling her friend, “If they had a massage therapist at this place, they’d make a fortune.”

Alas, there’s not even a Vibra-Fingers machine. All we have to help get us going is the staff’s inspirational reveille music: John Denver crooning “Rocky Mountain High.” Unfortunately, the weather outside isn’t particularly intoxicating. A melancholy curtain of Scottish Highlands rain-fog still hangs in the air. The weather forecast, something of an oxymoron in these parts, calls for high winds and more rain. Not the news one wants to hear when you’re in the shadow of Mt. Washington, which deserves all the respect normally accorded a great white shark. Every year the mountain claims the lives of a handful of hikers who get trapped in sudden killer storms. In 1934 a world-record wind of 231 mph was recorded on the summit; 49 inches of snow once fell in a single day.

Martha and I bundle up like Arctic explorers and set out to conquer Crawford Path, an 8.2-mile-long route, built in 1819 by the Crawford family, to the summit of Mt. Washington, and said to be the oldest continuously maintained hiking trail in the country. One good thing about fickle weather patterns is that sometimes they blow in your favor. We spend about an hour walking through stunning surroundings that we know are there but can’t see, obediently following cairns the way Hansel and Gretel did their bread crumbs. Suddenly, magically, the clouds lift. Presto! Like raising the shade on a window. The trail along the ridgeline flattens. The obstacle-course rocks disappear. It’s clear sailing ahead.

“This is like a hiking highway,” I crow.

We cruise on, occasionally encountering a hiker or two moving in the opposite direction. It is amazing what a little sun and high visibility can do. Everybody seems to be smiling, even the ground squirrels. Looking back at a roller-coaster ribbon of trail, I spot a familiar red splotch: George Pomeroy’s parka. We wait for him and Diane to catch up. They had gotten up early this morning to knock off Mt. Monroe, putting George one step closer to gaining admittance to that Four-Thousand-Footer Club.

Together we march in a southwesterly direction, scurrying up Mt. Eisenhower when we happen upon it. Cakewalk. The wide switchback trail leads to an anvil-flat summit that provides a 360-degree view of the rumpled valleys, as well as the steam-powered funicular that lazybones tourists take to the top of Mt. Washington. We pause for a granola-bar lunch, admiring four hawks that glide overhead with paper-airplane ease, feathered surfers riding the waves of invisible thermals.

As the sun fades we bid the Pomeroys farewell. They’re outward bound via a separate trail. Martha and I continue on to Mizpah Spring Hut. We drop below the tree line and gradually reenter the world of poison ivy and overhanging trees. My companion is in high spirits. After we change clothes and wash up, she actually buys a souvenir AMC T-shirt at the hut counter. We share a beef stew dinner with a bearded Appalachian Trails “through-hiker” known as “Mike the Engineer.” Through-hikers are proud dropouts from civilization who symbolically shed their everyday name along with their suit jackets and skirts and hike from one end of the Appalachian Trail to the other, more than 2,100 miles.

Mike the Engineer tells us his five-month journey is the gift he gave himself upon retiring from the military. “This was my transition to civilian life,” Mike says, chuckling.

Martha and I have real names and real jobs. Consequently, we are on the trail early the next morning. It is a made-to-order New England day. Crisp and sunny. Five hours of downhill hiking and ridge-running brings us to a trail head, where we rendezvous with the AMC shuttle bus that takes us to my car. Jammed under the windshield wiper is a note from the Pomeroys. “Congratulations!” it says. “You made it.”

Yes, we did. And I made a convert too. Two months later I get a letter in the mail from globe-hopping Martha, who is off in England earning a graduate degree. “I’ve decided to do the coast-to-coast walk when I hand in my dissertation,” she writes. Martha, the woman who regards sweat as see-through blood? Tromping across Great Britain?

In another letter she raises the bar higher. “I was %$# terrified,” she says, not-so-fondly recalling her first impression of the White Mountains. “But I did get a bit hooked on hiking and, gulp, I do want to do Kilimanjaro.”

She means Mt. Kilimanjaro. All 19,340 feet of it. Bully for Martha. I trekked up there a few years ago, but I am not making such lofty hiking plans these days. I’m busy recuperating from another softball injury. This time a ruptured Achilles’ tendon.

My cast is off and I’m walking again. Slowly. Today I called the Appalachian Mountain Club. Just out of curiosity.

I was told there are bunk vacancies at several huts. And plenty of frozen corn.

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GUIDEBOOK: Hut to Hut in the Whites

Getting there: United and American fly nonstop from LAX to Boston. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at $470.

The White Mountains are about a three-hour drive north of Boston. Concord Trailways provides bus service from Boston’s South Station to the town of Gorham, located near one of the national forest’s main access trails.

Appalachian Mountain Club shuttle buses cruise the periphery of the forest daily during peak season (June 7-Oct. 14). Hikers who enter and exit at different trail points can catch the shuttle to a handful of satellite parking lots. The one-way price is $6 for AMC members, $8 for nonmembers.

Where to stay: The hub of AMC hut activity is Pinkham Notch Visitor Center, 11 miles south of Gorham on New Hampshire 16; telephone (603) 466-2721. A night’s stay in bunk beds at Pinkham Notch Lodge, including dinner and breakfast, ranges $35-$47 for adults, $10-$31 for children 15 and younger; private family rooms range $45-$65.

Sleeping facilities in the full-service back-country huts are mostly bunk-beds in common rooms. Price, including home-cooked breakfast and dinner, plus sleeping blankets, ranges $40-$62 for adults; $23-$39 for children 15 and younger. The Appalachian Mountain Club main office (5 Joy St., Boston, MA 02108; P.O. Box 298 Gorham, NH 03581) has a telephone line for hut and lodge reservations: (603) 466-2727), fax (603) 466-3871). Visa and Mastercard deposits accepted. Book early. Prime dates fill up six months or more in advance. AMC’s information line ([603] 466-2721) provides updates on weather and trail conditions.

For more information: New Hampshire Office of Vacation Travel, P.O. Box 1856, Concord, NH 03302-1856; tel. (603) 271-2666. Most huts sell AMC’s White Mountain Guide ($16.95), a handy pocket-size map reference.

--T.D.