When I booked Chuck's, I had no idea if we'd be hiking in on a bone dry path, or skiing, or what. So I was psyched to see so much snow.
Shrine Mountain Inn is an excellent mellow introduction to hut trips and outdoor excursions. It's less than three miles from the parking lot to the hut, and you can follow the road for most of that. We stayed in Chuck's, which has hot and cold running water, a toilet and bath tub, solar powered lights, a propane range and oven, and even a propane fridge. And it's not a "hut" so much as a gorgeous log cabin. This was my first time carrying my gear for several days in my pack - my only overnight experiences have been car camping in the summer and fall - so it was nice not to have to worry about water or cooking gear.
Chuck's:
There's a road that takes you to within a quarter mile of the cabins, but it's closed in the winter. It was still open for the weekend when we got there - we drove maybe 2/3 of the way up, but the car was acting pretty squirrelly, so my husband dropped me and my friend off and turned around to go back, park, and skin all the way up. Kim and I skinned the rest of the way, started the fire to warm up the cabin, then headed back out to meet my husband. I'm glad we headed back out - by the time he got to the junction, it was fully dark, and no moon.
We got cold while waiting, so we explored a tiny bit and got a couple of turns in. Literally a couple. After these turns, we saw my husband approaching and turned around to meet up with him:
We could see Copper from our bedroom window:
As it turns out - pretty much everything right around Chuck's is super mellow. This was great from an avy safety perspective, but you can have too much of a good thing. The slope on which we thought we could make some mellow turns? It was so mellow that our skis just bogged down and wouldn't move. I actually abandoned the perfect untracked snow and skied down in the snowmobile tracks instead. There are some slightly steeper sections if we'd explored a little farther - something to try another day. Instead, we crossed roughly one million creeks on our skins.
While I didn't get any real backcountry turns in, I got lots of practice skinning, and particularly dealing with taking skins off and putting them back on again. It's amazing how quickly I got better at the whole process. And it was just a beautiful place to spend a couple of days. We played lots of dominos (two incomplete sets combined, so that we had two of some tiles and none of others - so we invented house rules), some Exploding Kittens (meh), and some obnoxious, complicated game my husband insisted on teaching us. We ate very well - steak with broccoli and rice, accompanied by red wine for dinner; eggs, sausage, and hashbrowns for breakfast; grilled cheese and ham for lunch; chili and cornbread for dinner; pancakes and leftovers for breakfast.
As much as I pared down my gear, I still used a lot less than I expected. Having dragged so much stuff up on my back, I now understand why backpackers do crazy things like shaving down their toothbrushes. I still had so much weight on my back even on the way down. And trying to ski down on frozen snowmobile/car tracks with a big heavy pack on my back was ... interesting. I'm glad that I bought a nice huge, properly fit Osprey pack several years ago, although it's crazy that this is the first time I've used it for its intended purpose.
I freeze when I'm sleeping, so having a shelter with a wood-burning stove seems like an excellent way to approximate camping without shivering miserably all night long. I definitely want to do this again.
Shrine Mountain Inn is an excellent mellow introduction to hut trips and outdoor excursions. It's less than three miles from the parking lot to the hut, and you can follow the road for most of that. We stayed in Chuck's, which has hot and cold running water, a toilet and bath tub, solar powered lights, a propane range and oven, and even a propane fridge. And it's not a "hut" so much as a gorgeous log cabin. This was my first time carrying my gear for several days in my pack - my only overnight experiences have been car camping in the summer and fall - so it was nice not to have to worry about water or cooking gear.
Chuck's:
There's a road that takes you to within a quarter mile of the cabins, but it's closed in the winter. It was still open for the weekend when we got there - we drove maybe 2/3 of the way up, but the car was acting pretty squirrelly, so my husband dropped me and my friend off and turned around to go back, park, and skin all the way up. Kim and I skinned the rest of the way, started the fire to warm up the cabin, then headed back out to meet my husband. I'm glad we headed back out - by the time he got to the junction, it was fully dark, and no moon.
We got cold while waiting, so we explored a tiny bit and got a couple of turns in. Literally a couple. After these turns, we saw my husband approaching and turned around to meet up with him:
We could see Copper from our bedroom window:
As it turns out - pretty much everything right around Chuck's is super mellow. This was great from an avy safety perspective, but you can have too much of a good thing. The slope on which we thought we could make some mellow turns? It was so mellow that our skis just bogged down and wouldn't move. I actually abandoned the perfect untracked snow and skied down in the snowmobile tracks instead. There are some slightly steeper sections if we'd explored a little farther - something to try another day. Instead, we crossed roughly one million creeks on our skins.
While I didn't get any real backcountry turns in, I got lots of practice skinning, and particularly dealing with taking skins off and putting them back on again. It's amazing how quickly I got better at the whole process. And it was just a beautiful place to spend a couple of days. We played lots of dominos (two incomplete sets combined, so that we had two of some tiles and none of others - so we invented house rules), some Exploding Kittens (meh), and some obnoxious, complicated game my husband insisted on teaching us. We ate very well - steak with broccoli and rice, accompanied by red wine for dinner; eggs, sausage, and hashbrowns for breakfast; grilled cheese and ham for lunch; chili and cornbread for dinner; pancakes and leftovers for breakfast.
As much as I pared down my gear, I still used a lot less than I expected. Having dragged so much stuff up on my back, I now understand why backpackers do crazy things like shaving down their toothbrushes. I still had so much weight on my back even on the way down. And trying to ski down on frozen snowmobile/car tracks with a big heavy pack on my back was ... interesting. I'm glad that I bought a nice huge, properly fit Osprey pack several years ago, although it's crazy that this is the first time I've used it for its intended purpose.
I freeze when I'm sleeping, so having a shelter with a wood-burning stove seems like an excellent way to approximate camping without shivering miserably all night long. I definitely want to do this again.
