As far as I could see, there was no place to rest. My husband, Sean, and I were venturing up to the unworldly Puez plateau, a vast, undulating altopiano rich in limestone but scarce in plant life. We had clambered onto this island in the sky from Brixen, the oldest town in the Tyrol region straddling Austria and Italy, passing the flanks of Sass de Putia (where, with some patience and binoculars, one can look upon a view of 449 church spires) and crossing over high passes where peaks teetered in the clouds and signs directed us in Italian, German and Ladin, with times estimating how long it would take us to get somewhere.
The thing about “somewhere” in the mountains, though, is the feeling that you’re somewhere and nowhere all at once is nearly constant. Each col, cliffside and valley has a name and has been tramped across to the point where the path of least resistance is (albeit still quite resistant) human-made via switchbacks and passes. You’re also nowhere that feels particularly hospitable.
Despite what the wildflowers and families of surefooted ungulates may communicate, other living things, like people, don’t flourish in terrain where rockfall, avalanches, substantial winds and long winters make the rules. Despite being absolutely out of my mind gawking at the beauty around and settling into the feeling of vertical feet passing beneath me, that truth was dog-eared in my mind as the sun began to set, the temperature began to drop, and we realized we had to figure out where to sleep in this bizarre world of limestone.
We puffed up a cable-aided stretch of via ferrata — Italian for “iron way,” these paths were built to aid the movement of alpine military units through the Dolomites during World War I — and peered into the steep canyon walls of Vallunga, sculpted by ancient vessels of ice, charting the courses of future travelers like us and carving canyons. Walls sheered away in each direction. Seemingly materializing through twilight’s filter like a will-o’-the-wisp, a hut appeared, perched in a grassy field hanging above the depths.
We bashfully let ourselves into the Rifugio Puez, barely removing our gloves and unshouldering our packs before a tall, blonde woman sat us at a table nestled in the wood-stove-warmed stube, or commons. Her name was Katrin. She is the wife of Costa Denis, the owner and operator of Rifugio Puez. She asked us if we could use a hot beverage. Could we ever. She came back with a mug of hot chocolate, and I would put money on it being the most luscious I’d ever had — like what I’d imagined as a kid when I read about cocoa as “thick and rich as melted chocolate bars” in “The Polar Express.” I was giddy.
Costa Denis’ grandfather, renowned mountain guide Pietro Costa, began managing the rifugio (a mountain hut) in 1940, before passing it down to his children, Oscar and Gemma. Costa Denis grew up spending his summers there, and, when the time came, took over for Oscar and Gemma. Now, he, Katrin, and their two little girls, Emma and Lena, spend weeks on end tending to the place, first built in 1889 and roosted in the same mountains that inspired the legends of dragons and giants that generations of his ancestors have told. Far from Jeep tracks and cable cars, they have supplies flown in via helicopter or packed up the trails by foot.
Basking in the glow of the stove, I watched as Costa and Katrin heaped steaming dumplings and apple strudel onto plates, washed dishes, carried firewood to the stove, pillows to bunkrooms, and water to the kitchen. How? I stared at the whipped cream piled in my mug. After any day spent walking or working sunup to sundown, things just taste good. But this little hot chocolate was a panacea. An impossible treat made feasible in this place only by the hard work of the one who created it and the one who was lucky enough to enjoy it.
As folks like Sean and I wandered in looking for a place to warm up, a place to sleep, and a bite to eat, only to flit away at dawn with our packs back on our shoulders to look for another place to awe, people like Costa and Katrin were here, watching the sun rise over Vallunga and keeping an eye on the small mountain lakes to ensure those mythic dragons didn’t rise out of the water. They remained. They knew so much more of these mountains than I ever would, and they gave me a place to rest in them.
There’s a misconception about choosing a simpler, more deliberate way of life. The simple life is not easy.
“Refuge” preserves its Latin root in both the noun (refugium) and the verb (refugere) interpretations of the modern word, used to communicate both a literal shelter and the figurative sanctuary that we seek — symbolic language fit perfectly to the shape of the rifugios and refugios of the Dolomites and the Andes, the doms of Slovenia’s Julian Alps, the cabanes of Switzerland and France’s Alps, and the huts of the U.S.’s Rocky Mountains. Etymology has a helpful tendency to provide an anchor for the often-elusive ways in which words float around the feeling of what we’re trying to say. But simply, the refuge … is for taking refuge. Even for hutkeepers themselves.
“It’s meant to be a shared refuge,” says Jeff Colt, who worked as the hutkeeper at the Carter Notch Hut in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and was caretaker at two of the range’s eight American Mountain Club-owned huts between 2011 and 2016. “As the hutkeeper, you are asked to take pride in the space. You’re asked to take care and upkeep it and make it hospitable so people feel welcome there. But at the end of the day, it’s not your space. That’s maybe the biggest lesson I learned through my time working in the huts. I have my own bed and I have my quarters, but this place is meant for anyone who’s seeking refuge from the elements in the mountains. That’s when I started to adopt that stewardship mentality: I am also a visitor here in this lineage of caretakers.”
It’s a relatively small community, even globally speaking, of people who know what it means to steward a mountain hut. The AMC huts hire just 49 caretakers each season. Some huts in the Alps — like the Great St. Bernard Hospice in Switzerland, a 975-year-old hostel that serves as a stop on the ancient Via Francigena pilgrimage, running from the cathedral city of Canterbury in England to Rome and Apulia, Italy, to ports of embarkation for the Holy Land — are manned year-round. In the case of St. Bernard, four canons (the people, not the weapon) and one oblate reside in the monastery full time, welcoming skiers and religious pilgrims alike in the winter, keeping carafes of hot tea at the ready, waking guests each sunrise with Gregorian chants, and holding the keys to the treasure room and crypt — where it’s rumored that the bodies of weary winter travelers who didn’t survive the deep snow and frigid temperatures remain.
The Opus Hut, which sits on an old mining claim between Telluride and Silverton, Colorado, is run by one man: Bob Kingsley. Legend has it he hasn’t owned a TV since 1987. He instead busies himself with the hut — filling gaps in the timber-framed cabin (which he built from reclaimed wood handed down from a dairy farm), maintaining the compost toilets, perfecting his chicken pot pie recipe and organizing the logistics of carrying between 8,000 and 9,000 pounds of winter supplies up to 11,600 feet from the valley floor. There’s a misconception about choosing a simpler, more deliberate way of life. The simple life is not easy.
A job listing for the post of Yosemite Ostrander Ski hutkeeper puts it well:
“Given this is a residential position, the work of the hutkeeper really is never done. The ideal candidate will take joy in connecting with overnight guests and helping create a convivial environment as part of the hut experience. This is a position for someone who loves to ski and host people as well as clean and maintain a precious old building.”
The typical morning for any given hutkeeper starts at 5:30 a.m. with the preparation of breakfast, followed by the serving of said breakfast and assisting travelers with their checkout and payments. Around 8 a.m., hutkeepers begin cleanup before finally enjoying a short breakfast and break for themselves. To finish off the morning, there’s more cleaning to do — the bunks, the bathrooms, the hearth room.
After lunch, hutkeepers often spend the late-afternoon hours prepping bread, baking pies or cakes, prepping water and the kitchen, chopping wood, doing laundry, accounting and the all-important task of inventory. Then, dinner calls. Then, dishes. So many dishes. Hutkeepers save their dinner for last, savoring it a bit after the drying racks are full and guests are washing their faces or shuffling decks of cards. At some point, the accounting for the day is in the books, the kitchen is clean, bellies are full and it’s time for bed.
One AMC caretaker once jokingly described the work as “the reverse 9-to-5.”
Oh, but to keep alive the delight of that simple life.
“This place is meant for anyone who’s seeking refuge from the elements in the mountains. That’s when I started to adopt that stewardship mentality: I am also a visitor here in this lineage of caretakers.”
Nearly 100 miles from Rifugio Puez, I draped my jacket across the back of a wooden chair in the living area of another hut called Rifugio Boz, a converted farm where schiz, a fresh local cheese pan fried with cream, is often served at dinner and where we slept in stables that now serve as a bunkhouse. How many had hung their wet jackets up in this room before me, grateful for the roof overhead?
Behind us on winding trails were the huts we had called “home” for the night. Rifugio Mulaz, where a loving-but-dutiful border collie named Stella greeted guests as the sunset fired up the surrounding peaks in a red blaze of light, and Rifugio Treviso, a hut run for over 20 years by mountain guide Tullio Simoni, his wife Mara and their son Igor. After a late-day storm chased us down a grueling 5,700-foot descent — past the remains of a 1950s plane crash — Igor heard the squish in my shoes as we plodded onto the creaking wooden floors of the hut to ask if they had room for two more. Before guiding us to our bunks, he showed me to the hearth and strung a line above the stove for me to hang my socks. They were dry again before he doled out a second helping of minestrone and read the weather report for the next day from notes scrawled out on a piece of notepad paper: blue skies.
“I’m pretty sure I’m a better friend, a better husband, a better lot of things because of my time in the huts,” reflects Colt. “And that’s not just because I learned that you should clean as you go and whatnot. It’s the pace of life and appreciation. It takes recognizing that you’re doing something for something much bigger than yourself to have that type of connection with a place.”
Back home in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, months after returning from the Dolomites, a cluster of brick-red stems and sharp purple petals clinging to the rocks lucky enough to have landed atop Mount Tuscarora caught my eye. I knew something looked familiar. They were alpine snowbells, the same wildflower that had dotted that impossibly green pasture that Rifugio Puez sits in. These flowers are one of the few with the ability to push through the snow and bloom before the thaw, thanks to an “antifreeze” carbohydrate its root system stores through the winter. Even in the harshest environment, it finds what it needs to blossom. I laugh to myself, recognizing that in some funny way, Katrin’s cocoa was my antifreeze nourishment that evening on the Puez Plateau, sustaining me in the mountains I, too, want to know.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.