CAMPING OUT IN AN AMC HUT

By Hamlet Fort

Written for AMC Outdoors Magazine, Summer 2015

I had forgotten about our nicknames. They were scratched into the logbook as clear and black as when the ink was fresh. Flava Flav. Armando. Vadush.

We memorialized the nicknames as part of Camp Agawam’s expedition to Madison Spring Hut in July 2007. That summer, during a three-day journey across the Presidentials, our group endured driving wind and rain, blisters and exhausted muscles, overbearing counselors, and an injury or two. For me, a kid from the South, the trip was a new kind of outdoor exploration. It was a revelation.

Now, I’m returning to Madison eight years later as an intern and writer for AMC Outdoors. Over three days, I watch two new rounds of Agawam campers experience the White Mountains. The hut was renovated since the last time I was here–undergoing a major upgrade in 2011–but the new interior is littered with the features and character of the old.

The same stone wall stands facing the view, a hundred years after it was raised. The dinner, packed in on the croo’s backs as it has been since the beginning, is masterfully prepared—especially to a group of ravenous hikers. The logbooks tell stories of decades past with new pages open waiting to be filled. Our nicknames, buried in a logbook from nearly a decade ago, will endure, just as the new groups’ entries will wait for them to return.

 —

Camp Agawam is a traditional seven-week summer camp for boys in Raymond, Maine. The 125-acre camp sits on the western shore of Crescent Lake, just a few miles from Sebago. Campers can try any activity imaginable–from windsurfing to riflery, tennis to woodshop. Each camper takes at least one trip out of camp during the course of his summer. Agawam sends groups out to Moosehead Lake, Katahdin, the Androscoggin River, and a host of mountains of varying difficulty in Maine and New Hampshire. One of the longest-standing expeditions, and certainly one of its most popular, is Mount Washington.

Agawam’s been going to the White Mountains since the 1940s. “It’s remarkable to see how little has changed,” said camp director Erik Calhoun. He should know. Calhoun visited AMC’s huts as a camper with Agawam in 1984. His father led Agawam campers to Mount Washington in the 1950s, and soon his son Everett will make the same trip. Calhoun said there are reports in the camp office from expeditions to the Whites and AMC’s huts dating back over 60 years.

I had never seen a gorge like Tuckerman Ravine or a summit like Washington until my own introduction to the Presidentials, at age 14, in the summer of 2007. To my young imagination, standing in the thick cloud and bludgeoning winds, we could have been atop Everest halfway around the world.

The snow in Tuckerman (in July!) captured my interest almost immediately. We traversed the ravine at a slow pace. As my breathing labored and sweat poured, I kept looking up at the sharp incline of broken rock ahead, where the trail disappeared into obscurity. Each step became a more difficult endeavor. But in the last half-mile to the top of Washington, where we huddled around the summit sign on an elated high of mountain domination, my outlook turned. I was having fun.

Later, sitting in the Lakes of the Clouds Hut, dirty, smelly, and still wet, with sore feet and a full belly, I was entranced. The lake had emerged from the mist as we descended from the summit, and we wondered if the place was truly real. What is this refuge? I thought. All I had known on the trail was rock and wetness, and here was a sanctuary in the clouds. I was electrified by the hut’s feeling of remoteness and isolation, paired with its oxy-moronic rustic luxury, finding the combination thrilling and unexpected. As we summited Monroe, Jefferson, and Adams along the ridgeline the next day, I felt a growing sense of place. I belong here, I thought, my trepidation in Tuckerman Ravine the day before a dim memory. The second night, as I poured my third cup of hot chocolate at Madison, I felt initiated into the backcountry.

The new groups of campers arriving at Madison now—wet, cold, tired, and thrilled—remind me of then. The hot chocolate is still here, and the campers react the same way my friends and I did eight years ago, relishing the treat as a reward. As the evening wears on, the campers, in their socks or sandals and hats over their ears, give of an air of exhausted satisfaction. Some boys play chess or cards, others read nature books or explore nearby Star Lake. The difficulty of the trail seems long distant in the rearview.

Darasimi Lowe–“Simi” to his campmates and counselors–wants to hike Katahdin next year. Last summer he hiked Royce Mountain (3,200 feet) in Maine, his first true mountain hike, and he was hooked. The trip ignited a burgeoning desire within him to challenge more peaks. This year, when the time came for the White Mountains expeditions to load up, Simi was first in line.

Harry Philbrick came on the Mount Washington trip last year. Philbrick’s a year or two older than the other boys, most of whom are seeing the Presidential Range for the first time, so he’s a relative veteran on these trails. Why did he come back? “For the sights,” he says, as he carefully aligns black pawns along a chessboard in the bright sunlight streaming through Madison Spring Hut’s window. Fulfilling his old-soul aura, Philbrick adds, “And my glutes.”

Patch Barnard doesn’t seem the type to leave camp. Since his youngest years, he could be found almost anywhere around Agawam, from the arts and crafts hut, to the soccer field, to the sailing regatta course, to the archery range. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who loved the place more. True to form, Barnard didn’t want to leave camp for the three-day hut trip. At first. “But now? Now it’s unbelievable,” he says. Barnard and Philbrick jaunt quickly up to Star Lake after dinner, jumping from rock to rock, and showing off their mineral knowledge “That’s quartz!” “No, it’s not!” “Here’s some mica!” The two exchanged thoughts about how “cool” and “awesome” the place was before the light slipped behind the cover of Mount Adams and they returned to the warmth of the hut.

—

At least one thing has changed, as I learn over these three days, and that’s my perspective. As an adult and intern with the AMC, I see the hut from newer, different angles—especially, the life of the croo. Now, midmorning after the first group of Agawam campers has packed up and set out for the ridgeline, I sit outside with two visitors.

“They called it a ‘high adventure,’” says Alan Bebout, on croo at Greenleaf Hut this summer and visiting Madison on his off-day. Referring to a trip with his Boy Scout Troop, Bebout first came to the White Mountains around the same age that I did. Bebout says, when it comes to teenagers in the backcountry, the hut experience really makes a difference.

Agawam is far from the only group that takes kids into the backcountry. Whether it’s a summer camp, a Boy Scout troop, or an intrepid family, there is a long list of potential catalysts in a child’s life exploring the outdoors.

“That trip started a lot of interest in backpacking with friends who might not have otherwise,” said Bebout, recalling how “super proud” he was of the mountains he had summited. The trip stirred so much interest for Bebout that he’s now on his first summer on hut croo.

Alex Johnson, visiting Madison on his time off like Bebout, is on croo at Mizpah Spring Hut this season. He first came to these peaks with a summer camp after his freshman year of high school. The routes that crawl throughout the White Mountains were “unlike any other trail I’d been on,” he says. His group stopped at Lakes of the Clouds Hut, and Johnson said he knew immediately he wanted to work there. “It seemed unreal to me,” he says. “It was an impossibly cool opportunity, and a great bonding experience with the outdoors.”

As he stands on a chair in the dining room of the Madison Spring Hut, croo naturalist Nate Iannuccillo encourages the campers to dance. He’s explaining fog and water condensation, and he’s using playing cards to illustrate his point.

He gives out two cards to each participant. “If your number is more than 18, you condense! Move to the other side!” he shouts, trying to convey that more numbers represents more water molecules. The campers and other visitors comply, brushing shoulders to move across the room. To demonstrate the bouncy nature of gaseous water, the “fog” group with the lower numbers on the cards, dances among strangers.

Iannuccillo studied atmospheric science in college and during a stay at the Mount Washington Observatory. The campers, encouraged by the interactive nature of the program, listen attentively to the science behind the White Mountains’ famed weather. The program is also timely—it’s dark and stormy outside, and the forecasts don’t look good for tomorrow. The typically volatile White Mountain weather, unchanged for decades, is an ideal meeting point for the hut croo and the campers to interact.

As is the food. As she chops lettuce for that evening’s salad, Whitney Brown talks about her family.

“My grandfather worked at Lakes of the Clouds during the 1940s,” says Brown, now the assistant hut master at Madison. “He packed in the same as we do. He worked on search and rescues like we do.” She says it’s indicative of the hut experience’s endurance in an environment where change is on a geologic scale and durability is critical to survival.

The majority of the croo’s day-to-day work is cooking and cleaning. Wednesdays and Saturdays are pack days. Then there are small rituals, only visible to the croo or someone with special access, like me. As I stand in their kitchen in the late morning, after their guests have gone and the cleaning’s finished, they laugh in a huddled group. It’s time to read the comment cards.

It’s clear they’re mostly pleased with themselves, since this batch yielded no negative comments. Certainly not from the group of Agawam boys–in my memory, the croo held a prestigious, almost idolized role–and likewise, the croo was happy to have them. Brown says the energy escalates with a camp group.

“A big benefit of the huts is that it makes everything accessible for kids. It teaches them to appreciate the outdoors,” she said. “Backpacking can be not so fun for kids if it’s raining and cold, but the huts help with that.” Ryan Koski-Vacirca, the hutmaster at Madison Spring Hut, articulates the relationship between the huts and their setting: he calls them “the mediator between the backcountry and the front country—a way for people to be exposed to the mountains that have never been before.”

The croo is the biggest reason for the huts’ environment of hospitality and comfort. “It’s such a homey feel after a long hike,” Patch Barnard had said, earlier that morning over breakfast. “The food is better than camp’s!”

Soon, the second camp group has arrived, after 12 miles from Mizpah Spring Hut. They’re hungry, and the prep is creating some alluring aromas, but they know there’s more to the croo’s role. “They aren’t just here to feed us,” says 14-year-old Michael Placenti. “(Their work) is greatly appreciated.”

Hut croos will help kids assimilate to the backcountry for years to come. But it’s the relationship between a summer camp like Agawam and the AMC that get the boys and girls out there in the first place.

“It’s really important,” said Calhoun, of Agawam and AMC’s unofficial partnership. “You’d find at least 20 camps who’d say the same, I think.” Yet Agawam’s history with AMC may be the most personal. Agawam’s previous director of 22 years, the late Garth Nelson, worked on hut croo as a young adult decades ago.

—

Now I’m a veteran of the White Mountains. I’ve explored alone, for work, as a camper, as a counselor, and with a college buddy. Each time I return I think about the summer of 2007.

Never more so than now, as I watch the second group of Agawam campers hold a map to the wall in the Madison Spring Hut the morning of their departure. Crowding around, the boys trace routes on the map with their fingers, pointing out where they came from yesterday and where they are going today. They fill their camp-issued Nalgenes, and pull on their packs’ straps. It’s time to head out.

I stand in the doorway to the hut with a cup of coffee, watching campers and counselors ascend the Gulfside Trail, a single file line of vibrant colors poking through a windy, bitter mist. Hanging back in warmth of the hut seems like the right idea this morning, but there’s a nagging sense of loss I can’t shake. My thoughts return to the summer I first came here, eight years ago. As I watch the campers and counselors depart, déjà vu sets in, with strong memories of one of my young life’s transformative moments. I remember the personal outcome of that trip–a new path blazed with a deep appreciation and love for the outdoors–and I know what I must do next. I loiter around the hut a little longer, chatting with the croo, the swirling grayness unchanging outside the windows. I load up my pack, strap my boots tight, and venture into the fog.

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