A Labor of Love--6,000 Feet Up Old Baldy

It’s barely sunup and I’ve got goose bumps here at 6,000 feet while my warm jacket sits lonely at home. We haven’t even left the trail head near Baldy Village in the eastern San Gabriel Mountains and yet here I am, hungry and shivering. Some outdoorsman.

The two dozen other volunteers are milling around a tarp with assembled foodstuff, tools and equipment we’ll need for the work party at the San Antonio Ski Hut. There’s chain saw fuel, fittings for a new bank of solar-powered lights and toilet paper for the outhouse. Most of the implements we’ll need are already up at the hut, 2,100 vertical feet away.

High above the Los Angeles Basin, detached from roads and ski resorts, the ski hut is a winter hostel treasured by independent skiers and mountaineers who crave seclusion but want a dry bed and a stove to cook on. It gets about half a dozen overnight visitors every weekend in the winter.

The small frame building is 64 years old and requires regular maintenance. Traditionally, the same people who have relied on it for winter shelter have organized the work parties that come here twice a year to make necessary repairs.

Several of the volunteers have slept at the hut hundreds of times over the decades and feel a duty to help. For me, being in the mountains is reason enough to join the work detail, though I am also drawn by a sense of history and a need for belonging to a community of people who share my love of the outdoors.

Anyone can volunteer for one of the work crews by contacting the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club ( www.angeleschapter.org/lodges/sanantonioskihut.html ).

The trail is punishing. It leads from Manker Flats up the flanks of Mount San Antonio, the 10,064-foot peak many now call Old Baldy. It’s only three miles up to the Baldy Bowl, the skiable slopes crowning the hut, but the rise is constant and exposed to the sun.

I’m carrying a light load of kaiser rolls, a quart of guacamole and 150 miniature chocolate bars. I quickly fall into trudge mode, but I still welcome any excuse to stop, whether it’s the scenery unfolding below me or the bighorn sheep droppings at my feet.

The hut sits in the mouth of a high canyon which ends in the four stages of San Antonio Falls. Looking up after an hour’s hike, you get an early glimpse of a tiny hut with a mint-chocolate-chip paint job.

As late as May some years, the hut is accessible only by skis or snowshoes. On several occasions, people have tried to reach the hut from the Mount Baldy Ski Lifts, a few miles to the west, only to lose their way and have to be rescued. The hut has been a lifesaver for a few people who have knocked on the door and announced that they’d been wandering lost for days.

There were no cable ski lifts, at all, in Southern California when the newly formed Ski Mountaineers Section of the Sierra Club received a permit from the Forest Service in 1935 to build the hut.

First came a simple shack erected by a cadre of UCLA students and Dr. Walter Mosauer, an Austrian transplant and zoology professor at the university. When it burned down within the year due to carelessness, skiers replaced it with a larger four-room structure.

The tin-roofed building became even easier to see after much of the surrounding timber burned in the 1980 Thunder Fire. The original construction of the hut was a gargantuan task well suited for men with a Depression-era work ethic.

Almost every scrap of building material had to be lugged up, no matter how unwieldy. “I carried up the kitchen stove,” said 78-year-old Bud Halley of Whittier, one of the original builders who still skis here.

Halley said the heaviest timbers and the floor joists in the 20-by-30-foot structure were toted “donkey-back.” But the wood-burning stove, oak floors, plywood ceilings, sand and roofing all arrived piggyback.

Despite its rough-hewn origin, the hut has its creature comforts. The original builders tapped a spring that feeds San Antonio Creek, providing running water 50 yards downhill in the kitchen. It’s unfiltered and untested and tastes great. The cold water is also used for immersion refrigeration.

A small room still nicknamed the “Harem,” which housed the hut’s first women, now is a storage room, and tonight both sexes will share 16 padded bunks, floor space and a one-hole outhouse.

“We’ve gone from candlelight to kerosene to Coleman fuel to solar power,” Halley said. “But still it isn’t everybody who will ascend three miles and 2,100 feet to make one or two ski runs all in one day.”

In the dry season, the majority of visitors to the hut are day-trippers. The Baldy summit is an hour’s climb past the hut and the round-trip hike is a favorite of locals. Today, they file past the hut just as the volunteer firewood brigade gets underway.

Dead wood, most of it felled by the 1980 fire that also claimed the original outhouse, is the hut’s source of heat for warmth and cooking. Once a promising stash is found, the workers form a loose chain and toss chunks to one another until about a cord of wood is piled outside the hut.

Sawed and stacked under the hut in a crawl space, it should last all winter. Inside, others get busy caulking windows and rehanging shutters damaged by a visitor who explained the forced entry with a note complaining of a snowstorm. The note, however, did not include a name or money for repairs. Outside, there’s more work to be done. A retaining wall needs rocks and dirt to fortify it, and the outhouse needs a new paint job.

No one minds taking a break when a mountain ewe and her lamb appear from below the hut to cast inscrutable gazes upon the activity. Unhurried, the twosome disappear in the brush and work resumes. We don’t hear the telltale boom of bighorn rams butting heads for breeding rights, so they must be off somewhere eating grass.

As the sun slips behind Baldy’s summit ridge, the workers file inside for hors d’oeuvres, mountain water, beef stew, baby greens, and two patriotic cheesecakes with blueberry stars and strawberry stripes.

After dinner, some rise to heat water and prepare for dishwashing duty while others lounge on bunks and benches, taking in the scene. The paneled interior of the hut is festooned with old photos, decrepit ski equipment and a twisted piece of fuselage from one of the two Marine Hellcats that slammed into the mountain in formation during a training run in March 1949.

Perhaps to aid digestion, hut veteran Walt Davie, 69, sings an ode that sends at least one worker scurrying up the path to the outhouse, flashlight in hand. “Metamucil, Metamucil, when you mix it up with juice’ll, make you happy, no refusal,” Davie sings out.

A trip to the outhouse sets the stage for sound sleep and good dreams. A window affords a view of the starry sky and the surrounding hillside. Earlier in the day, workers poured a mixture of bacterial culture and water into the outhouse hole to encourage biodegradation. The years have piled up since the outhouse was built 21 seasons ago, and nobody wants to dig another hole.

Now, well fed and sporting a borrowed fleece jacket, I descend lightly from the outhouse and hear the sound of a tinny acoustic guitar kept at the hut for the long winter nights ahead.

I’m ready for winter. Bring on El Nino.