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  Below is a web sites one in honor of my son and the other the trip to the shelter him and his friends made.  click on pitcure of trip to hut march 7.  The girl in the picture was afraid of heights and wanted to spend her birthday with him in his hut and the dog is my son's dog Logerdogger and the guy if Phils friend the othe man that was with my son in the avalanche.

http://picasaweb.google.com/dwilliamsfamily/

1) Megan on the slope with snowshoes.  She is almost as afraid of heights as I am. (2) Logger pooped-out. I have spent an entire day hiking with that dog running up and down the trail waiting for Devlin and me to catch up For those of you who don't know, Phil and I pretty much never stopped living together after we left Harvey Mudd - something like 18 years together.  That is, until about a year ago when I moved into an apartment with my girlfriend, Erika.  Phil moved into a house with Devlin, Kevin and three other bike messengers.  I thought the house was a good match for Phil, with its youthful energy and alternative vibe.  Phil and Devlin had been going on crazy hikes together for years, although I, as a pampered, fair-weather rock-climber, hadn't been going with them.  Their primary obsession was backcountry snowboarding.  Phil once carried a fifty-pound pack, with snowboard and boots hanging off the back, five miles up a dry, dirt logging road, just for a 30 foot run.

It was Devlin who hatched the plan to build a shelter in the backcountry, near the Crystal Mountain Ski Resort, for them to use as a base in the winter.  Phil jumped in enthusiastically.  They spent long, secretive weekends for months working on the shelter, packing in huge loads - Phil carried in a wood burning stove and stovepipe - and prepping it for the ski season.  Phil, Devlin and Kevin were heading out to see how their "hut" had handled the first winter dump, when they disappeared.

During the search for them, I was obsessed with finding that hut.  I even had a brief stand off with the incident commander over it.  In the end, Greg, a friend who had been to the hut before, was able to helicopter in with a search team and confirm that the boys never made it to the hut.  I never made it to the hut either, despite trying, and it gnawed at me.

While at Crystal, over the days of the search, I met Devlin's partner, Megan.  She and Devlin had been together for ten years - her entire twenties.  This last Sunday was her thirtieth birthday and for it, she wanted to hike in, find the hut, and spend a night in it.  When I heard that she was looking for people to go with her, I knew I wanted to go.  When I found out that no one else was free, and that she didn't have much backcountry experience, I thought screw it, let's go.  But I wasn't entirely brazen: I knew I wasn't in great shape myself this winter and that I might end up having to help her out, so I jettisoned as much as I could from my leaden pack: stuff like a tent in case we didn't find the hut, my down jacket, extra fuel and my winter sleeping bag, opting for my tiny summer bag instead.  I'm not sure why I didn't track down a GPS coordinate for the hut, or call Greg to confirm his description of where it was.  I guess I'd obsessed about his description so much and stared at the topo map for so long that I felt it was burned into my psyche.  Not finding the hut just didn't seem like an option.

Sunday was a beautiful, sunny day for a hike.  The avalanche danger had tipped into the Considerable category on Saturday, but was decreasing gradually, except for some danger on sun exposed slopes.  To be safe, we opted for a longer ridge hike instead of a more direct line to the area where we knew the hut was hidden.  We figured we'd be slow, so we gave ourselves 6 hours to hike in. That meant up at 5 am, be at Megan's place by 6 am, drive to Crystal, and be hiking by 9 am.  That would leave us 3 hours of daylight to find the hut once we got within the general vicinity.  Unfortunately, we didn't get hiking until around 11 am, in part because we met with a guy who worked at Crystal and had been out to the hut a few times since the search had been called off and had declared the hut still untouched.  When he recommended bringing avalanche probes to search for the hut under the snow, it didn't quite click in the rush to get going that maybe he'd never actually been in the hut.  Maybe he knew it was untouched because it was still safely under the entire winter snow pack.  We borrowed an extra avalanche probe and beacon from him for Megan, and headed off.

The hike in started with a 2,000 foot gain past Bullion Basin, a popular backcountry ski area, to a saddle looking into Union Creek.  The saddle was the last place that Phil and his friends were seen.  The hiking was pleasant in the sunshine, with a nice, packed trail to follow, though we were moving slower than I expected.  I was tired when we made the saddle at 1 pm and the long ridge hike ahead of us looked discouraging with all its ups and downs as it wound around the head of the valley to the opposite side.  I voiced my concern to Megan about the time and the distance still to cover, but she was undaunted and resolute about pushing on.  I didn't want to let either of us down, so I swallowed my worries and kept hiking.  We got lucky and were able to follow tracks for most of the ridge. It wasn't until the end that we had to forge our own way through fresh, deep snow.  When we finally got to the area described by Greg, it was 4:30 pm and we had little more than an hour of daylight left.

I marched onward, mentally ticking off minor terrain features Greg had described as leading to the hut.  They soon ended and, looking around us, my heart sank.  We were in the middle of the woods and there was no hut in sight.  Megan waited patiently for me to point out the hut, and when I said it was time to start probing, she dutifully pulled out her avalanche probe and asked where to start.  It was then that it occurred to me that the boys might not have wanted their illegal hut to be easily found, and my heart kept sinking.  So we wandered through the woods, looking for clumps of trees that might be used to support a structure, pushing our 8-foot probes into the snow until we buried our fists.  At one point Megan called me over to a likely candidate, a hump between some trees where our probes hit something consistently, but it was deep.  We got excited and started digging.  But our excitement turned to dismay when we'd dug about five feet and it just didn't seem possible that the hut could be that deep. We're talking about a hut with a 6-foot ceiling!  Hadn't the guy from Crystal been out here and seen the hut?  How could it be so deep now?

The daylight was starting to fade and in a final effort before we lost the light, we split up.  Megan kept looking for spots to probe and I backtracked to the first reference point and retraced our path, racking my brain for memories of Greg's descriptions of the terrain and second guessing my memory.  I thought about Phil.  I have a terrible memory and Phil was always assuring me not to worry, he'd remember everything for me.  And he had.  Where was he now to help me?  And where was the damn hut?!  Was I really not going to find it?  Get so close, after wanting it so badly, and then fail?  I felt lost.

I got back to Megan and we took sullen stock of our situation.  The light was fast fading, it was getting cold, we were far too tired to turn around and hike back out, we had no tent, and the prospect of sleeping out in the open in the snow was infinitely less appealing than it had been back when I was packing.  Jerry had once convinced Phil and I to do just that one night, years ago, on the edge of a windy lake and it had been a horrible idea.  Our best option now seemed to be digging a snow cave, except, I'd never actually dug, or slept in, one before, despite all my mountaineering.  Megan had me beat: she'd at least slept in one that Devlin had made for them once.  Since we'd already started a hole at the spot Megan had picked out earlier, we decided it was a good start to our snow cave.  I asked her for pointers on the layout, and started digging.

The snow was dense and heavy and the digging was tiring.  I was getting soaked, sitting on my butt and crawling through the snow hole on my knees.  Megan set up our stove and started brewing hot drinks and prepping dinner by headlamp.  No complaints from her, she was still determined to see it through, wherever it took her.  I didn't want to be the one to start whining, so I kept digging, despite a complaining lower back and a deepening gloom about the prospects for a comfortable night.

When I started to widen the cave to make room for us to lie out in it, my shovel struck something metal.  It looked like a forgotten cooking pot and I curiously went to dig it out.  It turned out to be the cap on a stovepipe, jutting up from the floor of our snow cave.  I couldn't believe it.  I climbed out and asked Megan to come take a look at our cave.  She crawled in, started looking around and then came bounding out of the cave whooping with joy.  We'd found the roof of the hut, under 6 feet of snow.

We cleared out the stovepipe, and peaked through gaps in the roof.  The hut looked sound.  I could see a dirt floor dimly in the darkness below.  We took some time deciding where to dig for the hut entrance. The roof seemed too strong for us to break through where we were, though we considered it in our tired state.  After some deliberation, we picked a spot and got lucky again, but not without effort.  By the time I'd dug out the doorway, 9 feet deep, and steps leading to it, I'd been digging, with some help from Megan and a short break for food, for three and a half hours, and that after a five hour snow hike. It was after 9 pm.  I was beat.  And soaked.  And cold.  But when I first hit the doorway tarp, and crawled in by headlamp, alone, and stood there inside the hut, I was so relieved, and grateful and happy.  I stretched out on the dirt floor to rest my aching back and took a solitary moment, with Megan brewing another batch of tea above me, to take in my surroundings.  And I thanked Phil and Devlin and Kevin for building this hut for us to sleep in, on a cold night, on Megan's birthday.

-dave-guy

I tried to take photos, to share the experience with you.  They are posted at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/david.wesley/