Author's note: This is a story with sexual content but requires a long buildup. As usual, please feel free to comment.
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There is a place in New Hampshire called Zealand Valley. The valley is created by a brook named Zealand brook (thought some do call it Zealand River!). Following the brook up the side of a mountain brings you to several breathtaking falls named Zealand Falls. A short walk beside the falls and you find an old logging cabin named Zealand Hut. All of this is in the White Mountain National Forest and the Hut is cared for and maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Zealand Hut is comprised of 4 basic rooms on the main floor, a kitchen, dining area, and two bunk rooms on either side of the dining area. The bunk rooms each contain six bunk beds where each bunk bed houses 3 bunks meaning 18 people per bunk room and 36 total guests.
The Hut is full every weekend almost all year around. People hike to it in the spring, the summer and through the beautiful crisp fall air. In order to get a bunk, you have to schedule it in advance. Then there is winter. Only the hardiest folks come out to Zealand Hut in the winter. Even so, every weekend is full and if you were trying to book a team of 4 people for a weekend trip in January, you'd better book it in September or forget it!
The reason the hut is only for the hardiest of individuals is because there is only a tiny wood stove to heat it and the bunkrooms are never heated. I must correct myself. The bunkrooms are only heated by body heat! By policy, the wood stove is lit at 4:00pm and sparingly fed small pieces of wood until 8:00pm when the last log is placed into the dying embers. In mid January or February, when the temperature is generally 7 to 10 degrees above zero outside, the temperature doesn't get above 45 degrees inside and hangs around 15 degrees in the bunkrooms. Yes, it is cold, but people come and have come to enjoy it.
The hut is located approximately 7 miles from the nearest road and the trail leading to it is mostly uphill. The good thing about that is that when you leave, it is mostly downhill! This is particularly good for the cross country skiers who come to Zealand Hut in the winter. It is a ton of hard work to ski up that mountain. That hard work generates heat and for most folks, that heat keeps a person warm even though the temperature might be 10 degrees, they might only have a nice thin wool sweater on while they skied.
The human body is a wonderful machine. It generates heat when it works and as skiers ski up the 7 miles, they generate a lot of heat. When they get to the hut, their bodies keep generating heat and will keep them warm right through the night even though their sleeping bags might be rated at 25 degrees and the bunk room is 10 or 15, they are still warm because their bodies keep producing heat.
My name is Jake and I am a caretaker at Zealand Hut. Often there are a team of folks as caretakers, sometimes a husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend. I do it alone. Sometimes the AMC will send someone to help with the busy weekend, but most of the time, I'm fine by myself. I sleep upstairs in the caretaker's room where it's generally warm because ... heat rises!
During the winter, I work 12 days over a two week period, generally starting on a Thursday and ending on a Monday. My number one job is the safety of the weekend warriors who drive their BMW's from Boston to brave the wind, the snow and the hills with their 35 pound backpacks and they test their mettle against Mother Nature. In order to take care of their safety, I make sure there is enough wood for the wood stove, check the propane tanks for the lights and the industrial sized cook stove. Getting the wood can be tricky. I always having to ski out and pull wood from various stashes of wood that were set up in the fall. Loading up a backpack with 50 pounds of wood and skiing with it on my back for a couple of miles certainly keeps me in good shape. Lastly, I am always watching the weather and posting projections. The weather is very tricky up in New England.
Though the weekends are packed usually with 36 people each on Friday and Saturday, Sunday through Thursday are mostly empty or just one or two folks. This past January 28th, a Monday morning, I had awoken, after a very busy weekend, to a nice quiet hut. No one had slept over and it had snowed and quieted everything around the hut. I lay under my down comforter with my breath visible in the cold of the hut, but I wasn't cold, I was toasty warm.
The radio squawked and I answered. It was the base camp at Pinkham Notch informing me that I would have guests; four women were scheduled for an overnighter. Current temperature at the hut was 5 degrees and the guys at Mt Washington were projecting a series of storms that would pass through the valley as the low pressure moved the high out of the region. I could expect snow by 1:00pm. I'm sure the Boston TV weather guys were all predicting sunshine!
I thought about the four women and let my mind drift in the hope that they would be cute. If this was a movie, they'd be members of the Swedish Ski Team! Reality returned to me in the form of reasonable skepticism. I was not likely to see a group of seductive, manicured, red toe-nailed, beach babes up in the mountains of New Hampshire! I was more likely to get a hardy group of 45 year olds disenfranchised and then divorced from their husbands, straight out of the granola set. Hairy armpits, hairy legs, and toenail fungus would be more like what I'd get at the Hut! I didn't mind but I was missing the view of the babes from Boston! Perhaps staying up at the hut alone was beginning to affect me!
I cleaned up the hut and readied it for visitors. I looked out the front window down the valley and could see that the visibility was diminishing quickly, eight miles and closing. Death for the guests is generally not something I worry about as most folks who come up are fit and can make the climb. Even so, the most common reason for death in the mountains is hypothermia. Hypothermia occurs when a person's body temperature gets reduced so low that they don't have the capacity to warm it up again. The body starts shutting down extremities and parts of the brain is one of those extremities. So, death generally occurs because somebody ends up with hypothermia and starts doing dumb things like taking off their hat and mittens because they are confused. On top of that, they start wandering around the forest and end up half naked in 3 and ½ fee of snow. The fastest way to get hypothermia is to get wet, perhaps because of a fall in cold water. The water soaks you down to the skin and stays there. Cold water gets through your clothes faster than cold air and it pulls the heat from your body like nothing else.
The seven mile trip into Zealand hut has 9 major river, stream or pond crossings. Of the 9, four can be considered dangerous. With care, the dangerous ones become moot.
