Friends Hut, built in Colorado in 1985, is one of the sweeter ski cabins around. Built with all volunteer labor, memorial for plane crash victims, beautiful location in the Elk mountains between Crested Butte and Aspen. Gestation of the hut involved a bunch of fund raising as well as problems acquiring a permit to build it on public land. I detailed some of that years ago in our Friends Hut article, but I’ve recently being doing some curating of the historical archives. A few amusing and interesting scans resulted:
Board meeting 1994, everything the authorities thought about us was true! But we got the job done.
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I wonder if such a thing would happen today(?) The mountain folk of those days were a quite a tribe of visionary do-ers. The distance involved between up high and down below were greater then. Pioneer self sufficiency was more evident and the great smothering bureaucracy was just showing its corpulent hand…
It’s definitely gotten way worse in terms of getting special use permits to build huts on public land. In 1984 I thought the USFS was being too obstinate, but basically all you needed to do was some politicking and get a signature from the district ranger. In my opinion, key these days is to find private land parcels and bypass much of the bureaucracy (but unfortunately not all of it, as you still have to deal with anti-growth building codes, ignorance of elected officials when it comes to the state of winter recreation worldwide, and that sort of thing.)
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