Up where the air is clear

A shed is merely somewhere to keep tools. A hut, on the other hand, is a doorway to sporting adventure

- Robin Ashcroft

MY first encounter with huts of an adventurous nature came in Austria when, as an 18-year-old, my Alpine career started —and almost came to a premature end—in the Stubai Alps. As well as my first 11,000ft peaks, it was also my introduction to the shock of an ‘Alpine start’. To be safely off the mountain before the mid-morning sun triggers rockfall, an Alpinist needs to leave the hut in the early hours. The deep freeze of a pre-dawn glacier is always brutal, but there is the compensation of an Alpine dawn, as the sun creeps over the peaks to set the summit snows alight in a pink blaze against an azure sky.

Doug Scott—who was well known for the first successful ascent of Everest’s southwest face—summed up Alpine huts: ‘When you arrive there’s supper and a warm bed, but getting up a few hours later, to head off, into the dark and cold, well, that’s adventure. Uncertain outcomes and all that, but then dawn breaks—wonderful!’

Supper, too, is all part of the ritual of an Alpine hut and is usually a sociable affair.

In the case of the French, it is also a stylish one with Club Alpin Français-monogrammed crockery. Afterwards, digestion invariably kicks in and a trip to an airy ‘thunder box’ is required. Few, however, surpassed the outhouse of the—now sadly demolished— Abbots Pass Hut. At 9,596ft, located between Mount Victoria and Mount Lefroy in the Canadian Rockies, there was a vista from this ‘loo with a view’ that could captivate, even at risk of frostbite.

Alpine huts first appeared as mountaineering tourism, following the end of the pioneering ‘Golden Age of Alpinism’, developed from the mid 19th century onwards. At about the same time (and rather like Alpinism), fishing was ‘codified’ by British sporting gentlemen. Interestingly, both pursuits had their own London clubs—the Alpine Club and the Flyfishers’ Club—which set conventions. Like its Alpine cousin, a fishing hut was more than a simple shelter.