First Day on the Job

A week ago Ben Lewis was stuck in Cheyenne, WY. This spring he graduated from high school, and like the Donner party he headed West with high hopes. The dude ranch in Dubois, WY (said Due-boys) where he had a job put him to work in the scullery. Instead of sage, far-off thunderclouds, and the Tetons he saw nothing but grease, baking pans, and burnt soup pots. Soon enough Ben was headed East. Somewhere near Cheyenne his Subaru died, unable to face another crossing of the Nebraska plains. His older brother Malcolm is on the crew at Lakes, and told me about his predicament. When I spoke to Ben about filling an open spot on the crew at Lakes he was about to get on a Greyhound to Denver.

On Thursday Caitlin and I hiked down to Lakes to meet him. In the valley it was overcast, still and humid. At the summit the wind was gusting past 50, driving a cold rain into your face hard enough to hurt. Caitlin and I soon found we were under-dressed in our trail sneakers and thin windclothes. As usual I considered how this poor preparation would read in an Appalachia accident report: “Despite years of experience in the weather of the White Mountains Mr. Kautz’s pack contained only some frozen waffles for the hut crew and a cotton sweatshirt.” Just as I considered turning back Caitlin and I came upon two men wearing blue jeans and plastic fishing ponchos. “Quite the weather” they said with smiles, and disappeared into the fog.

Caitlin and I bucked up and carried on, arriving at the hut in slightly better weather. The Lewis Bros. were both asleep, having spent the previous night hiking to Mizpah and back on a social visit. Before we could wake them up a breathless hiker arrived at the hut reporting a hiker with an injured ankle. I borrowed some dry pants and we put our packs back on. Fifteen minutes down the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail we came upon the gentleman sitting with his wife.

Marshall (not his real name) was from New Jersey and hiking Mt. Washington for the first time. He had slipped while climbing up a wet ledge and slid about 8 feet. His ankle rolled when he landed. Marshall was complaining of extreme pain and a “crunching” sound when he tried to stand. His ankle was swollen and he was sure that he would not be able to walk. He was nauseous and pale. He was also 6’3” and 250 pounds.

Using a portable radio I called back to the hut for the litter, as well as down to Pinkham to ask for more carriers. The Galehead naturalist Selena happened to be visiting Lakes on her days off. She ran the radio at the hut while the rest of the crew came down the trail. We put Marshall into the litter on a foam pad and a sleeping bag. The eight of us took our places around the litter, and on the count of three, lifted him.

If you have not carried a litter before, the best way to simulate what it feels like would be to take a 5 gallon pail to the trailhead of your next hike. At the trailhead fill the pail with water so that you have 40+ pounds in one hand. To make the experience realistic it would also help to have a well-trained 30-pound beagle who could hop onto the top of the pail at the steeper sections of the trail. As the litter takes up the center of the trail you’ll need to hike in the brush on the side of the trail. All this is to say that even with a fairly light patient carrying a litter is physically demanding.

With only eight of us to carry Marshall everyone was at their limit. Getting the litter up over the wet ledges was tough. We could only move about 30 feet at a time before we had to rest. Everyone, from Brian Quarrier who is the size of a black bear, to Lynne Zummo who weighs 100 pounds, was straining, grunting and panting. We sounded like a colony of walruses trying to hike uphill.

Just as we were becoming exhausted Katherine Siner and her father arrived. Katherine is from St. Johnsbury, and her father serves in the Vermont National Guard. A few days before he had returned from a 2 year deployment in Iraq. Now he was hiking up with Katherine to visit the hut. Mr. Siner looked the kind of man you’d want next to you in a fight. He had a close crewcut and was the size of a refrigerator on legs. He had a sweat towel around his neck. He looked at the scene for a moment with his hands on his hips. Then he went to the front of the litter, the heaviest part. He grinned and said “At least no one is bleeding and no one is shooting at us.”

With Mr. Siner leading us on we made it to the hut. It took us only 15 minutes to reach Marshall, and over 2 hours to bring him back up. At the hut he made a remarkable recovery. After a physician looked at his ankle and wrapped it in a brace he found he could indeed stand, and walk quite well. He decided he would prefer to stay at Lakes for the night and rest, then walk to the summit in the morning. All of us on the litter carry preferred this as well.

After putting the litter away the crew washed up. It was 5pm and time to start making salads and setting tables for the 92 guests waiting for dinner. Ben Lewis was having a big first day in the huts, and he looked a little tired. As Caitlin and I packed our bags to leave I asked him if the day made him wish he were still back in Cheyenne. “No way” he said.

Thunderstorms

Standing above treeline watching a line of thunderstorms coming can feel like standing between the rails of a freight train mainline. On my way to Mizpah I hiked the Crawford Path up to Mt. Pierce. Up on top the wind was getting gusty and the sky was black in the west. Bolts of lightning were walking east over the foothills. The few raindrops that fell were the size of marbles. I headed down into the trees and toward the hut.

Along the way I stopped briefly to admire the work of the AMC Trail Crew. Along the Webster Cliff Trail they have been replacing bog bridges, over 50 so far this month. Each plank weighs 75 pounds, and had to be carried to its bridge site from the nearest airlift zone. Bog bridges span mud pits, so setting the timbers is a muddier job than catching a wallowing pig that knows it might become bacon.

Just after I got into the hut the storms arrived. It rained so heavily that it was hard to hear the thunder over the roar of the water coming down. Tristan Williams and Heather Day burst back through the door from a day hike in the Dry River Wilderness looking like they had fallen out of a boat. Brian Quarrier arrived soon after looking dazed. He was on the ridge coming from Lakes when the lightning started striking. He sprinted across 3 miles of wet rocks and down the Webster Cliff Trail which was now flowing like a river.

My first summer in the huts I had a similar experience when a storm caught me above treeline on the Boott Spur Trail. I was carrying my skis back to Lakes so I could take advantage of the late snow in Oakes Gulf. Cowering in between some rocks I could smell the ozone from the lightning. I found for myself why foxholes and the upper slopes of mountains in electrical storms are rare places for atheists.

The storms passed Mizpah during dinner. After Dave Weston, the Hut Naturalist, gave a program on weather I headed down the trail. I was in flowing water to my ankles. Until this night I had never had a headlamp die on me in the backcountry. This night, maybe because of all the moisture, mine ceased working. It made the second half of the Crawford Path a slow walk. By staying in the water I was mostly able to stay on the trail. After 11pm I saw the lights of traffic passing through Crawford Notch. As I drove home along the swollen Saco River the stars were coming out.

J.E. Henry and Zealand Valley

Tessa Stiven, the Zealand Naturalist, begins the story of the Zealand Valley with J.E. Henry. She explains that: “Despite being one of the biggest timber barons in New Hampshire, and one of its wealthiest men, there is not a single geographic feature in the state that is named after him. In his time he was despised and called ‘a wood butcher’ and ‘a mutilator of nature.’ The creation of the Forest Service and the White Mountain National Forest were in part a reaction to J.E. Henry’s treatment of the Zealand Valley.”

One-hundred years has erased many of the unintended monuments to James Everell Henry. His log-walled lumber camps have rotted, beaver have flooded his log yards, and the CCC scrapped the last of his locomotives. Along the AZ trail giant birches grow in park-like glades. Moose wander down his old railway. But, as Tessa tells the story of the landscape, J.E. Henry still throws a shadow.

He grew up on a rocky farm near Littleton in the 1840’s. When he was 15 a horse kicked his father in the face, destroying an eye. As the oldest son James became responsible for his father’s work, driving four-horse freight wagons 110 miles between Littleton and Portland, ME. There was no time for school. His father and three siblings died of tuberculosis in 1845. James began to make a living and a reputation as a shrewd horse trader. As he started his own family with his wife Eliza he tried his hand at farming potatoes, the oil business in Massachusetts, and growing wheat in Minnesota. Logging was the only venture he ever made money at.

By 1882 he had bought out his two partners and was the sole owner of a new logging operation in the Zealand Valley. Over the next 10 years J.E. had his lumberjacks empty the Zealand Valley of old-growth spruce. As there were no rivers big enough to drive the logs on he had a railroad built. Crews of Italian immigrants living on macaroni and bread chopped out roots, pulled stumps and graded gravel for the railbed. During the winter his woodsmen cut all the spruce bigger than 10” at the stump. Eventually the railroad reached 11 miles from the town of Zealand (near the current USFS campground) to Ethan Pond. His lumber was used in the construction of houses, stores and factories all over New England.

J.E. was no P.R. man. His business motto was “Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first” and he was quoted in a Colliers article as saying “I never see the tree yit that didn’t mean a damned sight more to me goin’ under the saw than it did standin’ on a mountain.” Had he been cutting further north, or in a more remote section of woods, he may not have been vilified any more than any of his timber-baron contemporaries. But both the Boston and Maine and the Maine Central railroads had tracks running near the Zealand Valley. These lines brought wealthy summer guests to the grand hotels at Crawford Notch, Twin Mountain, Bretton Woods and Fabyans. They passed by the town of Zealand with its steaming sawmill, immense log piles, and the stained drying laundry of Henry’s laborers.

J.E. never gave anything away. He collected and shipped the manure of his woods horses south to be sold as fertilizer. He charged his men for the equipment they broke. The food in his winter camps was so bad the lumberjacks wrote songs about it. He also decided he could make some extra money during the slow summer season by running sight-seeing trips on the Zealand Railroad.

He began these trips in 1887, one year after a forest fire, started by a spark from one of his locomotives, had burnt 12,000 acres in the Zealand Valley. While the area around Thoreau Falls remained unburnt and picturesque, the train ride in provided tourists with a clear view of the consequences of industrial forestry. In some places the fire had burned so hot that it incinerated the topsoil, leaving white granite exposed like bone.

The fires came at a time when the industry of the northcountry was beginning a shift that continues today. In 1889 the timber industry had revenues of 2 million dollars, while the tourism industry brought in 5 million. After J.E. Henry the American appetite for wood would no longer be supplied by the vacationland of Bostonians and New Yorkers. There were vast uncut forests further west and out of sight.

Tessa herself comes from one of the places that today feeds American paper mills, saw mills and lumber yards. She grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, surrounded by the largest temperate rain forest in North America. Environmentalists call BC the “Brazil of the North” for the clearcutting which happens there. Companies like Weyerhaeuser are the controversial modern counterparts to J.E. Henry.

In his excellent history “J.E. Henry’s Logging Railroads” Bill Gove, a retired forester, offers a defense of his subject. He writes, “Henry was one of those rare individuals who came from a poor family background and through personal drive, dogged determination and clever manipulation built an empire worth millions. The resource was there in front of him; the market was there demanding the product; all he did was put them together.”

As I hiked down the Zealand Trail in the morning fog I thought about the history of the valley. Before breakfast I listened to Tessa and Steve practice their morning wake-up song behind the hut. The building is almost swallowed by the forest (photo). The Zealand Trail follows the railbed that spruce logs on railcars once rolled down. The forest is returning. However, somewhere else it is being cut. Patches of Tessa’s home forest will become cardboard boxes, catalogs, pressure-treated porches and bleachers at baseball fields. The market will always demand product, and a company will be there to take a profit. We make the market. And where trees mean more, on the mountain or under the saw, is not a question to be asked only of the logger.

Garfield Ridge, Hutmen, Mothers, and Stitches

Nathaniel Goodrich, one of the men to cut the Garfield Ridge Trail described the route as “a horrible mess,” “an awful tangle” and “Also there were bugs.” Hiking the ridge trail today is easier than crawling through trackless spruce thickets, but it is still a route with a Puritan character. The hike is hours of toil for two revelatory views of wilderness.

I left Greenleaf around 5:30am and climbed Lafayette. The diapensia are in full bloom on the mountain (photo). From the old foundations of the summit house Galehead looked distant (photo), and I regretted eating only a candy bar for breakfast. The wind was cold and carried a few drops of rain. I kept my pack on and kept walking, down over all the false summits of Lafayette and into the spruce. A few miles later I emerged from the green tunnel onto the top of Garfield. After three weeks of wet weather the Pemigewasset Wilderness is as emerald and unbroken as a rain forest.

I continued on to Galehead and arrived as the crew was cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Selena, the naturalist, was away, and so the hut was in the hands of three boys (photo). Nate Lavey of Dunbarton, NH was looking sleepy after cooking breakfast. James Wrigley, of Lexington, MA was hutmastering, which included aerating the waste in the composting toilets with a pitchfork, and then filling out a food order for the coming week. Dan Cawley, of Conord, NH was getting ready to hike out with a load of trash and the week’s paperwork.

Before 1970 only “hutmen” worked in the huts. Women (“Hutmen F’s” they were dubbed) were only hired in desperation, as during WW II. Now, most summer crews are an even split between hutmen and hutwomen. Nate, James and Dan are the kind of guys who don’t mind not having girls around. Not so they can be crass and lockerroomish, but so they can order Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Kraft Cheese Singles (in the little plastic wrappers) and hotdogs as their three special foods for the week. Which they took advantage of Selena and Shaila’s absence to do…

While I was at the hut Nate mentioned that he had not called his mother since before Memorial Day. I suspect that any regular readership this web log sees is composed of mothers. Specifically crew mothers who are hoping the posts or the photos will give them some better idea of what their sons and daughters are really up to. As their boss I am equally interested in what they are really up to. Thus far this season I have only caught them doing what they should. Mrs. Lavey, in case Nate has not called, he is well. On my visit he had made some delicious pancakes. He favors wearing an old pair of brown shoes and pants with the legs rolled up. I’ve posted a photo of him beginning his bread dough for the day.

After breakfast at Galehead I hiked down the Gale River Trail. The population of the forest understory has shifted already. The trout lilies have disappeared, flowers, leaves and all. The trillium have also vanished. In their place are lady slippers, in both pink and white (photos). The blue-bead lily is also out (photo) with starburst-yellow flowers that will later become a blue berry.

I got a ride back to Lafayette Place, where I parked the day before. As I arrived the two-way radio began crackling with word of an injured hiker on the Lonesome Lake Trail. I started up the trail, again wishing I had eaten a heartier breakfast. Half a mile up I came upon members of the Lonesome crew bandaging a bleeding hiker. As I got closer I realized the hiker was one of the crew.

In the middle of several packboards and backpacks was Hillary Marlena Gerardi. Despite a name fit for a South American novelist or poet she is from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. On her way down from Lonesome with a load of trash she rolled her left ankle and fell. Her right knee smashed down on a sharp rock. “I could see white” she said, “I think that was my patellar tendon.” Dave Kaplan, visiting from Madison, had bandaged up her knee, while Andy Patari ran back to the hut for a litter. Hillary was stoic, but I could see how scared she was that this might end her season at the hut. Later in the summer she has plans to climb Mt. Rainier with a group of Middlebury College students. Sitting on the trail, holding her knee together, she was shivering a bit. Erin Robson, the assistant hutmaster, cut the arms off her sweater to add to the bandaging.

The bleeding slowed, and Hillary is not too much heavier than a packboard with a few turkeys, a case of eggs and some frozen vegetables. With six people carrying the litter she was in the parking lot in less than 10 minutes. A few of her crewmates drove her to the Littleton Hospital ER. The doctor sewed up her knee, and sent her home with an ankle to hip knee immobilizer. After a few days at home she hobbled up to the hut on crutches.

After the litter carry I went back to Pinkham and did paperwork.

Quiet Night

The huts have always served meals “family-style.” During the early weeks of June this phrase is especially accurate because the groups of guests are family-sized. On Tuesday I stopped at Greenleaf for the night. There were only three guests on the books. With the official start of summer still two weeks away, and many schools still in session, these will be the only slow nights of the season.

Eric Pedersen is the Hutmaster at Greenleaf. I call him Mr. Pedersen because when he interviewed for a crew position three years ago he arrived in a tie and blazer. He served the guests while Christina Arrison (known as Cricket) ran the kitchen. Geoff Graham washed the occasional dish.

After dinner the three guests and all the crew went to Maia Pinsky’s evening program on bogs. Eagle Lake, just below the hut, is actually a bog. Its water is acidic and low in nutrients. Some plants, like the sundews and pitcher plants, have turned to carnivory. They trap and eat bugs. They live like grouchy Yukon hermits, eating whatever comes to their doorstep.

In the evening Geoff and Cricket sang Irish folk songs (photo), and everyone went to bed early.

History through Botany

Halfway between the summit of Mt. Washington and the Lakes-of-the-Clouds is a stretch of felsenmeer. Felsenmeer is an old onomatopoeic German word for “rock sea.” It is more economical of breath than “unstable boulder field” (important while hiking), and more poetic than “jumbly bunch of rocks.”

During a trip to Lakes on Monday I stood in the middle of this plain of broken rock, watching the clouds open and close like curtains across the view to the west. Under my feet I could hear water running. Under this felsenmeer are the headwaters of the Ammonoosuc River. The water flowing under your feet and under these unbalanced boulders will also flow past small towns (Sugar Hill Station, Lisbon, Cold River), sawmill towns from the log-drive days (Bellows Falls, Turners Falls, Holyoke) and concrete cities (Springfield, Hartford). Along the coast between New Haven and New London it will roll past Poverty Island and Saybrook Point, out into Long Island Sound.

Standing above treeline in the Whites is like looking at fossilized bones in a museum, or the depressions worn into the stone stairs of a old cathedral. For a second you can almost grasp how much time extends behind you. Then a gust of wind hits you, the clouds come down, and you move on.

As Nancy Slack and Alison Bell note in their Field Guide to the New England Alpine Summits (just republished this year by the AMC), the alpine zone really is a museum. After the Laurentian Ice Sheet retreated much of New England would have looked like this alpine tundra. Sedges and shrubs clung to the rocky till while katabatic winds blasted down from the retreating glaciers. These plants grew as far south as Georgia. 13,000 years later you need to drive 500 miles north to Labrador to see these arctic plants at sea level. Or you can hike the Presidential and Franconia ridges. If you are a Mainer you can head to Katahdin. If you are in Vermont you can climb Camel’s Hump, or cross Lake Champlain to the High Peaks of the Adirondacks. Each of these small islands are outdoor exhibitions of what the Eastern landscape looked like when the global average temperature was only a few degrees Celsius cooler.

The first hikers on Mt. Washington came to name the alpine plants. While Darby Field climbed it in 1642, no one regularly walked high on the mountain until naming plants in Latin became a popular pursuit for Boston scientists. Carl Linnaeus’s system for naming organisms started a race to discover and classify new plants. In the early 1920’s the tundra of the Presidentials was the Wild West of American taxonomy.

The names of the botanists are as well-known to any hiker as the names of the presidents. Boott, Bigelow, Oakes and Tuckerman. Jacob Bigelow’s life was big enough that Googling him 127 years after his death brings up enough websites filled with accomplishments to make one feel distinctly lazy. A member of the Linnaean Society he taught science at Harvard. This included the “useful arts,” which he decided would be better named “technology.” He wrote a three-volume guide on medical botany and developed a new printing process for the illustrations. Jacob thought the deceased should have a pleasant place to repose, so he founded the Mt. Auburn Cemetery. This cemetery is often cited as the first landscaped public space in America, and the blueprint for all subsequent garden cemeteries. Bigelow is buried there, along with other famous Americans from Fannie Farmer to both Oliver Wendell Holmeses.

Many of the plants he and the other botanists came to name are in full bloom. Rhododendron lapponicum (Lapland rosebay), diapensia lapponica (Diapensia) and loiseleuria procumbens (Alpine azalea) are all blooming on the slopes of Mt. Washington. As the rosebay’s latin name indicates, it is rhododendron, albeit a small one. Like an SUV compared to a hatchback, the smaller plants require less energy to run. Look at the AMC’s Mountain Watch website, or pick up a copy of the Slack and Bell field guide at one of the huts to learn more.

Go soon. The communities of diapensia, Lapland rosebay and alpine azalea are most beautiful during the next two weeks. Also, global warming can be an abstract concept while shivering in a cold fog above treeline. However, these plant communities will not survive a significant increase in yearly average temperature. Go now.

Neither Rain, Nor Boots

Today it rained hard in the Whites. It was also a packday for the crews. Each Wednesday and Saturday everyone but the cook ties a load of trash and recycling onto their packboards and heads down the hill. At their packhouse they meet a truck from the storehouse and exchange their trash and paperwork for new paperwork and fresh supplies. In these boxes among other things: cheese for lasagna, bacon for breakfast, and clean towels for the kitchen. The packboards weigh 10-15 pounds, and the packloads anywhere from 30 to 100.

I drove over to the Madison packhouse to deliver some necessities that didn’t make the airlift. On Route 2 I had to keep the wipers on high. The tractor trailers headed east threw walls of water across the yellow lines. At the packhouse Beth Weick, Nate Blauss, Karen Thorpe, Catherine Klem and Taylor Burt were untying soggy loads of cardboard and trash. Beth is the Hutmaster and a former competitive figure skater. She is short and tough. Nate hiked the AT last year and began working at Lakes after his hike ended. He does not like overheated feet, so he hikes in sandals. All 2,174 miles of the AT, and all his packing in the huts (photo). Taylor is the Assistant Hutmaster and just returned from a trip to the Antarctic. Karen is the hut naturalist, a Mainer and a marathon runner. Catherine is new crew, and once rode from Crawford Notch to Hanover on her bike while carrying a whitewater kayak on her head. Left to cook at the hut was Dave Kaplan, who just graduated from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering. Before working in the huts Dave used to spend his summers doing high-level research with lasers at MIT. He also has helped design race cars and off-road trucks which drive themselves.

I handed over a 10-gallon cookpot, a box of kitchen knives, and 2 mattresses. The eight pillows, two trash cans and 10 plates needed are still on order. The crew was shivering as they tied the boxes on the boards. “We won’t be cold on the way up” Beth said. Then they hoisted on their packboards and walked into the rain.

Lonesome Again

Today a visit to Lonesome gave me the chance to ride my motorcycle across the Kancamaugus Highway. The clouds were low and dark, but the rain never came. In Franconia Notch the sun was shining on the Cannon cliffs.

Up at Lonesome the Hutmaster Erica Marcus was training a new cook. Justin Rowe was cooking for 5 guests, including a 2-year-old (photo). The new food storage space and crew room is a huge improvement. Angel and Chris (see prev. post) are to be highly commended for their work. The crew has made themselves quickly at home. The room is scattered with boots, hiking clothes, backpacks, and books. The new windows have a view of the lakeshore and the Franconia ridge. This room should make a comfortable year-round home for the summer crews and winter caretakers.

Two Ships

Yesterday from the summit of Mt. Washington we could see but not hear the helicopters circling the Lakes of the Clouds Hut. I had never seen a hut airlift from above before, and the whirling striped blades of the ships made them look like hovering dragonflies. With the windows of good weather closing the helicopter company put two pilots and helicopters on the Lakes airlift.

Caitlin, Ana and a high school senior from Maine named Anthony (he was doing a day of job shadowing with me) ran down the mile and a half of rock to the hut to help. When we arrived the two helicopters had just dropped two nets, 1,600 pounds of food, outside the crew door of the hut. Brian Quarrier, a first-year crewman from New Hampshire was at the nets, tossing 60-lb boxes of canned tomatoes through the open door. Inside the hut the Lakes crew formed a fireline up to attic and was passing boxes in a frenzy as if the nets were a pet shelter on fire and the boxes were paraplegic cats. Here I also saw something I had never seen. The weather at Lakes was as warm as it ever gets, in the low 60’s, and the crew was sweating right through their heavy double-kneed canvas Carhartt work pants. Shivering at Lakes is common, sweating is not.

The rest of us soon overheated too. With two ships flying there was just barely enough time to clear the landing zone before another net came in. Adding to the challenge Lakes received further renovation this spring. Thanks to a generous donor the hut has new mattresses, new blankets, and new pillows. Each bunk now also has a small shelf and multiple hooks.

However, all the bedding arrived in the midst of the food. One helicopter began dropping mattresses on the far side of the hut, while the other continued dropping food at the crew door. Now half the crew worked to move 110 mattresses inside, and bulky 70-pound boxes of wool blankets. The boxes of pillows felt like containers of air by comparison.

This continued for 3 hours. On each trip back down to the valley the helicopters lifted out construction material, human waste, and cardboard. A bit after noon one helicopter landed and picked up the CC top crew. They disappeared into clouds to the west, headed for Zealand.

The Lakes crew sat down to a quick lunch. The following day their first guests would arrive, and the hut was still a long way from ready. There was still a day’s worth of work organizing and cleaning the hut. The hut store had to be organized and hundreds of t-shirts counted and folded. The bunkrooms were waiting to be assembled and swept.

As Caitlin and I hiked back to the summit we thought about our own seasons spent opening Lakes. Each year has its own particular challenges. My first season the hut was still buried under snow and we could walk onto the roof where the front door was. We spent two days shoveling out the windows and doors. Caitlin once spent three days with her crew and putty knives chiseling off varnish from all the hut walls. It had been applied in the fall and started flaking off in the winter. These are the experiences that form the hut crews for the bigger challenges in the summer to come.