Europe is known for its network of high-alpine huts, where you hike from lodge to lodge and eat dishes like goulash and spaetzle before retiring for the night in plush accommodations and then hiking on to the next hut the following day. But you don’t have to leave the country for a taste of that experience.
“The U.S. is on the verge of embracing what huts are all about,” says Sam Demas, author of the forthcoming guidebook Hut to Hut USA: The Complete Guide for Hikers, Bikers, and Skiers, which will be published in October. “There’s a big appetite for hut travel in the U.S., and we’re seeing more communities develop new systems.”
Demas, a self-described hut nut who runs the website Hut2Hut, estimates that there are well over a dozen such systems across the country, with hundreds of lodges, yurts, and backcountry huts you can hike to from Maine to Oregon. And more are on the way. The Alaska Huts Association plans to break ground in 2023 on a linked three-hut system in the Kenai Mountains, the Vermont Hut Association has a long-term vision for a series of huts across the state, and Colorado’s Grand Huts Association hopes to one day connect nine huts from Berthoud Pass, near the ski resort of Winter Park, to Grand Lake.