According to Lou Dawson, the first hut mostly used as a skiing base camp in Colorado was likely created in 1946 when Fritz Benedict, Billy Tagert and Jay Laughlin repaired John Stubaggr’s old dam tender’s cabin at the head of Castle Creek above Ashcroft, Colorado. The Tagert Hut has been rebuilt and is now a part of Colorado’s first ski oriented hut system, Alfred A. Braun Memorial Huts. Stuart and Isabel Mace of Ashcroft proposed the idea for a hut system in the area in the early 1950s. There are currently six huts in the system named after the Fred Braun, who managed it for over twenty years. Braun also founded Mountain Rescue-Aspen, the backcountry rescue and mountain safety education team in Pitkin County.

10th Mountain Division Hut system map in Continental Divide Cabin

This type of hut system had been a goal of Benedict’s since his 1938 graduate thesis in Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, “Hiking Trails in the Lower Wisconsin River Valley.” It includes a brief history of the hiking clubs and trail systems in America, and proposes a detailed plan, design, and hand-drawn maps for a 150-mile loop trail northwest of Madison, WI. Existing and ongoing trail projects in the east, such as the original hut system in America in New Hampshire, the Long Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and trails in the Adirondacks heavily influenced Benedict’s thesis. He trained at Camp Hale near Leadville in 1942 after being drafted by the army and returned to Aspen after World War II, becoming the first trained architect in the area.

Benedict formed The 10th Mountain Division Hut Association with other Aspen skiers in 1980 as a nonprofit corporation, “to plan, finance, build and manage, for public use, a mountain hut system that promotes understanding and appreciation of the natural environment while developing individual self-reliance.” The United States Forest Service initially rejected the proposal for the first two 10th Mountain Huts, due to concerns about the viability of a hut system and that they would leave an unoccupied building on public land for the USFS to deal with. Former Secretary of State Robert McNamara desired to build a hut dedicated to his wife, Margy. Benedict and McNamara assembled a group to put up a bond to guarantee the full removal of the huts if they were not used after five years.

As a result, the McNamara and Margy's Huts, designed by Benedict, were completed during the summer of 1982. Over the next decade, they built eight more huts. The 10th Mountain Division Hut Association now manages the most extensive Colorado hut system, with over 300 miles of trails and 34 associated huts, including the Braun & Friends Huts, Summit Huts, Grand Huts, The Continental Divide Cabin, Point Breeze Cabin, The Polar Star Inn, The Seipel Hut, Shrine Mountain Inn, and Vance’s Cabin.

Sources:

Dawson, Lou. https://www.loudawson.com/ski-mountaineering-history/timeline-north-american-ski-touring/

Dawson, Lou. https://www.huts.org/The_Huts/hut_history.php

Demas, Sam. https://www.hut2hut.info/founder-fritz-benedict-10th-mountain-division/

10th Mountain Division Hut Association History

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