Monday, December 03, 2007

Speak of the devil...

Lou Dawson has a new hut site, www.hutski.com.

Good directions, pretty good maps and - what I find especially useful - good descriptions of ski touring around the huts.

Wish I would have seen it last week - you've got a few possible choices for the first mile or so to 10th Mountain and the mess of cross country trails back there is confusing. I think our route was fine (leaving from the gravel pit at the end of the road in Crane Park), but the Wurt's Ditch route may have been even easier.

Even better, Dawson is promising to add GPS waypoints for each route. That'd be sweet, although my GPS has a long history of not working in the snow (which is to say, every time I've actually needed it).

You tell me, though, if you remove route-finding from the hut trip experience, have you made it too easy? Breaking trail through a foot of fresh snow on Saturday would argue for "no." But there's also that point on nearly every new hut I've been to, where I'm thinking, "We must have taken a wrong turn." And that tinge of despair and exhaustion inevitably makes it all the sweeter when we finally get to our destination.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Judging from the number of people who fail to find the huts or take hours longer to arrive I think the better route description the better. I have not been to many but your right the 10th Mtn hut has a number of turns you must make and I followed good tracks on a sunny day.