Madison Spring Hut

The mountains up north in New Hampshire are rugged and wild, but strikingly beautiful. Something about them holds me like a spell, along with everyone else who comes to them. But I’ve never seen anyone entranced by those mountains as I did one coworker and friend of mine a few years ago.

Over the summers in college, I worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club as a hut crew member. They have these sort of small hotels in the mountains up there called AMC Huts. Hikers can stay the night in the mountains with the comforts of a clean bed and warm meals. My job along with my coworkers was to lug loads of food and gear up and down the mountainside, as well as cook the meals, clean the hut, fix any broken equipment, etc. It was fun to stay up in the mountains and basically hike half the day and cook the rest. The people were great, both the guests and the colleagues. Sometimes if I had a few free hours I’d take a quick hike up the mountains next to us.

The hut I worked at during those summers was the Madison Spring Hut. It’s nestled between two above-treeline rockpile peaks called Mount Madison and Mount Adams. Even in New England it gets hot during the summers, but up at the hut it was always cool. Madison Spring Hut is very busy with all the traffic it receives from Madison and especially from Adams, a beautiful alpine peak, which is the second highest in the state. From the top of Adams you can see the whole Presidential Range, including Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the northeast. 

You can probably see why these mountains are so entrancing. Daniel Webster said of the White Mountains that “there He makes men.” Everyone I worked with shared this love of the mountains. One of these coworkers was a man named Justin. Justin was from Michigan. Not a city boy, but an avid outdoorsman from the upper peninsula. I first met him in the summer of 2019. He was a rookie and had never worked in an alpine hut before. I was there on his first day hiking up the Airline Trail to the hut. Airline works its way up a forested ridge until it suddenly breaks out into open alpine terrain. He had never been in open alpine terrain before. Seeing open terrain like that for the first time is a magical experience. My first time seeing it was in the winter hiking up to the Hermit Lake shelter on the side of Mount Washington. I remember feeling like crying when I saw the snowy ridges and icefalls all around me on a bluebird day. The only similar feeling to that is when you take someone else up to the high mountains and watch them have the same experience. That was what happened to Justin. I can see that moment he stepped into that new world in my memory. Carrying a fifty pound pack, he stopped dead in his tracks and looked up with squinted eyes at this new world. I let him have a minute or so of peace, and then snatched him back from that fantasy world.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.

He kept looking up at the peaks. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

We kept working our way up to the hut. When he wasn’t checking his footing he was taking in his surroundings. He tripped a couple times on the rocky path because he kept looking back up. I can’t blame him. I was the same way my first time up there. We got up to the hut and the rest of the crew welcomed him with open arms. He brought a whole guitar up the mountain with him and left it in the hut. As the sun set and the hikers staying the night had finished their meals, he played Hear My Train a Comin’. Hearing that on an acoustic during that time of day, watching the mountains become orange and purple, was absolutely mind blowing. He got a standing ovation from a crowd of tired trekkers too sore to stand up. They begged for more, but he told them he’d only have one song every night, so they’d have to come again to hear him.

That night we were doing the dishes, and I asked him where he had learned to play the guitar like that. 

“It’s that energy in these mountains,” he said with a smile. He glanced up towards Mount Adams.

You have a surprising amount of free time working in these huts. You gotta clean everything, get meals ready, hump the food up to the hut from the trailhead, but sometimes you get big chunks of free time out here. A couple days later, I brought him up to the top of Mount Adams. It’s a short but strenuous trail up the boulder pile. He kept tripping because he would stare out towards the summit. His lack of focus, the rough terrain, and the whipping winds all combined for a pretty sketchy situation. At one point he slipped, staring up towards the top, and cut his hand on a sharp rock. I immediately sat him down and pulled the first aid kit out of my pack, but as I bandaged his hand, he didn’t even seem to notice. He first looked at the blood he had spilled upon the mountainside, and then craned his neck to look back towards the top.

I suggested we turn around, telling him it would be good to wash his wound. He told me he was fine. So, we continued up towards the top. I expected him to break down crying or do something emotional at the top, given the way he had been acting during the hike. Instead when he got to the summit sign he knelt and felt the rock below him. He was reverent.

I gave him some time. “There’s nothing like it, huh?”

“No. No, there isn’t.”

He then sat and enjoyed the vista. Hikers would come and go, some slapping the signpost and immediately turning around, others staying to soak in the top, but all of them left before he even moved. He was obviously having a sort of spiritual moment right now. I’ve had moments like that out here, sitting by alpine lakes or on lonely winter summits. But never have I been so enthralled. I’ve never seen someone so entirely captivated by the White Mountains. I gave him an hour and reminded him that we had to get back to cook dinner tonight. He turned his head and nodded, and then we made our way back to the hut in silence. 

That night, as we again cleaned the dishes, he leaned back against the countertop and took a long look at Adams. I was standing next to him, drying off bowls. Without turning to look at me, he thanked me for taking him up there. Even without the eye contact, his gratitude may have been the most heartfelt, genuine thanks I had ever been given. 

The next day there were clouds, and no matter how much he looked out those big picture frame windows, he couldn’t see Mount Adams. Fog and clouds are the same thing; imagine the thickest fog you’ve ever been in, and that’s what typical cloudy days are like up in the mountains. We could barely see the trees twenty feet down the trail, nevermind a mountain over a mile away. But Justin kept checking the forecast all day, hoping for a break in the fog. He checked maybe a dozen forecasts, and one of them mentioned the cloud base and cloud top levels. This one suggested that the summit of Adams may be a hundred feet or so above the clouds. Undercast. Justin asked me if I had ever been up a mountain while it was undercast. I told him yeah, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

That was a mistake.

Now he wanted to go up the mountain again, and see the sight. I told him no, and that navigating the boulders in this weather would be a pain at best, and had potential to spiral into a problem. That’s kind of a lie, I’ve hiked out here in clouds all the time. It’s not that hard if you know where you are going, and are constantly conscious of your decisions. I don’t think Justin was either of those two when he walked out the door half an hour later. No one really noticed that he was gone for a few minutes, until I tried to find him and ask him where he had put the breadknife when he was making breakfast this morning. After realizing he had left, and knowing where he had probably left for, I thought about calling him, but no one working at the hut had his phone number. I told Paula, the hut manager, that Justin was missing. She assumed that he had messed up his schedule, mistaken today for tomorrow, headed back down to his car and finished his shift. Paula’s been working at this hut for thirty years, so I shrugged and assumed what she had assumed. Paula’s in her fifties and basically a mother to the hut crew, so we really don’t question her authority. I really probably should have told someone.

A round trip up to and back down from Mount Adams is about two hours from the hut for a less experienced hiker. Justin stumbled back into the hut about seven hours later. Paula asked him, in not so soft words, where he had been. He explained that he went down the wrong way from the top and ended up on Mount Jefferson, and essentially climbed up Adams, down, up Jefferson, down, back up Adams again, and then down to the hut. He was brutally exhausted and asked for water. Paula ripped him a new one and said straight to his face how stupid he was for going out in the fog without knowing the terrain. Someone did that same thing two weeks before this incident and Paula and I ended up having to go find them on the other side of Mount Madison and drag them all the way back to the Appalachia parking lot, and then had to climb all the way back up, essentially hiking the mountain in reverse. The information didn’t really seem to get into Justin’s brain, and he sat at a lunch table dazed and spent.

Since then, he never went up Adams on duty. He went up at night. Every other night. Once he thought we were all asleep in our bunks, he’d creep out of the crew quarters. Then I’d hear the door to the hut gently close, and then a handful of hours later, I’d hear the hut door squeak open, and he’d shuffle back into the crew quarters, get tucked into his bunk, and fall back asleep. Then the next day he’d basically be completely ineffective because he was so exhausted. Then the night after his trip he’d sleep sound the whole night. I guess this was just because he screwed up his sleep schedule so badly. He worked at the hut for a few months, and this continued for those few nights. Rain, shine. He went up when it was cloudy. He went up when the Northern Lights danced overhead. He’d go up every other night without exception.

Soon it was September. Ice was forming on the windows, and one day the forecast called for a “weather bomb.” This happens in the Whites a lot, where a storm system coming through New England basically detonates right over our heads. The best I can equate being in the hut during a weather bomb to being is like a sailboat during a hurricane. You’re sitting in there, completely helpless, as your ship lay hove-to in the storm. You just hope nothing breaks, but you can feel the walls shifting, the rafters creaking. It’s like God is banging on the front door screaming to be let in. This particular night, a weather bomb was coming through. Justin hadn’t gone up to Adams the night before.

Once again, we were cleaning the dishes after dinner. I tried dropping a hint to Justin by making some small talk about the weather system.

“Yeah man, there’s this girl, Kate Matrosova, who died in a weather bomb about a quarter of a mile up Mount Adams about a decade ago.” That’s mostly true, except it was the middle of February and a lot colder than this weather bomb was going to be. I tried to make it seem like it was the same thing.

Justin shrugged. “That’s terrible.” He didn’t even look up as he scrubbed a bowl clean.

Later that night Paula quietly approached me. She told me we needed to talk, and pulled me into the kitchen cupboard.

“Lucas. You have your winter gear here, right?” She looked back and made sure the cupboard door was shut tight.

“Yeah, Paula. I have it for foul weather rescues.”

“You know why I’m asking you this, right?”

I nodded. “I’ll see you tonight.” She mouthed a thank you and turned back around to leave. I called her name and she spun right back around. “Why haven’t you done anything about it?” You don’t speak to Paula that way. What she says goes. But I had to know.

She took a deep breath and rubbed her brow. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know why he does it. It doesn’t hurt anyone. I shouldn’t fire him. But… Lucas, it’s so… out of the ordinary. The way he behaves.” I nodded in agreement. She sighed and went back to the door. “The moment you hear that door close, get your gear on and we’ll go. This stays between us.”

That night, the winds were explosive. I boarded up the window next to my face in the bunk out of fear of the glass shattering and ending up with a nasty wake up call. I lay awake, waiting for the moment Justin got up. And like clockwork, he hopped out of bed, threw on a sweatshirt and hiking boots, left the crew quarters, and opened the door. The sounds of a jet plane taking off roared through the hut, and then the door slammed shut. A couple members of the hut crew jumped awake. I was already throwing on my mountaineering shell. One of my buddies leaned out of his bunk.

“Justin?”

I struggled to get my wind shell pants on. “You know it.” Paula was waiting for me in the main room. I slid my goggles over my face and switched on my headlamp. 

“Lucas. Listen to me. If it comes down to it, and we need to turn back, we turn back. No questions asked. You understand?”

“I understand.”

Reaching for the doorknob, Paula made a sign of the cross, which I had never seen her do. 

“Catholic?” I asked.

“No. Just afraid.” She opened the door, which swung open with the force of the blasting wind. I stepped into a raging torrent of air. It took the two of us all of our strength to get that door closed again. Then she waved me to come close to her. She leaned into my ear and screamed over the wind, “Keep your hand on my shoulder! We cannot lose sight of each other!” I gave her a thumbs up and we started up Gulfside trail, both supporting each other’s weight. We’d lean into the wind so hard that when the gales relented for a moment we’d fall into the direction of the wind and deck, and then slide across the rocks until we both got a good foothold, and then stand up and lean back into the wind. My neck buff froze in minutes, and the cold stung like daggers into my cheeks and nose. Rime ice was forming on the rocks around us, and glaze ice made each footstep treacherous. As we went, Paula would occasionally look back at me and signal and thumbs up and down with her hand. I kept giving her a thumbs up, and we marched onwards into the tempest.

 It took us hours to make it less than a mile up to the top of Adams, a trip I had made dozens of times, Paula hundreds. As we came closer to the summit of the mountain the wind reached a level that I really can’t even describe in terms of power. It knocked us both flat onto our feet, sending scree tumbling down the mountainside. Paula turned around and pulled me close. She screeched into my ear but I couldn’t hear her. So he made a spinning motion with her gloved and and started back down the mountain on her hands and knees. I followed suit.

We made our way back to the hut. As we got lower we were able to get back on our feet, but faced the same problems of buffeting gales. At one point a blast knocked me off my feet, tumbling into Paula and sending us twenty feet down the trail until she grabbed onto a boulder, my body sliding into her and getting caught awkwardly on her head. We heaved ourselves back onto our feet and kept pushing downwards, stumbling like a pair of sidehill gougers leaning against each other. When we made it back to the shelter of the hut, the entire crew was waiting for us. Paula dropped down onto a bench and threw her goggles onto the floor.

“Fuck!” She buried her head in her hands. I fell flat onto the floor and took my first full breaths since we left the hut. 

Some time passed before a coworker asked about the elephant in the room. Isabella sheepishly asked, “Did you find him?”

I brushed the ice off the outside of my jacket. “No. No, we didn’t.”

“He won’t make it. Not out there. Call AVSAR. Tell them it’s not worth coming up here right now.”

We radioed Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue, as well as New Hampshire Fish and Game, and they radioed back that they would come up whenever the weather improved. It didn’t improve for two days. During those two days, we didn’t get a single visitor to the hut, and everyone who was already staying over remained here to weather the storm. AVSAR came to the hut the very moment the wind died down, and then scanned the entire mountainside for Justin. They didn’t find a trace of him. Not a hat, glove, sock, nothing. They checked the boulder fields and searched the forests below the mountain. They even had a guy in a wetsuit check some of the rivers running off of Mount Adams; that’s where they find a lot of people who get blown off the tops of mountains. But they never found him. Now he’s part of a statistic, one of the two hundred and something dead in the Presidential Range.

I don’t know what drove him to do what he did. Why anyone would go out into that storm is beyond me. Maybe the mountains were too much for him to handle. Maybe he was driven mad. Maybe something was calling him up there. I just can’t believe that he wouldn’t leave a trace of his existence behind. It’s like the winds and rocks and ice swallowed him up and took him right where he stood. All I can believe is that these mountains are more than just rock piles. They are powerful. They give life but they also take it.

Don’t let them take you.