Towards the end of our time in New Zealand I realized I’d heard very little about the long range future of huts, and that I hadn’t found any academics studying the world’s largest hut system. The many passionate Kiwis I spoke with were, understandably, focused on how to preserve the huts they have and ensure equitable access to them. However my curiosity was finally satisfied when, of all places, I was at the Canterbury Art Museum. Asking directions to my next destination, the Lincoln University Library. Serendipitously, this lead to an interesting chat about baches and huts with museum staff member Janet Abbott. She said I should talk with her brother-in-law Mick Abbott at Lincoln University. What a fortuitous meeting! I have published some ofJanet’s great work about baches in Canterbury on my web site, and just before leaving NZ, I had an inspirational conversation with Professor Abbott about the future of huts!
Mick is a hard-core tramper deeply involved in NZ conservation issues, a creative and provocative thinker, and a landscape architect. He seems to relish asking questions, but insists on not getting stuck on finding immediate answers or mired in ideologies. His thinking represents the kind of idealism and insistence on aspiration that I imagine makes many pragmatists impatient or dismissive, and/or seems hopelessly unrealistic. My sense is that he is always striving to stretch our thinking towards the future, towards new, seemingly impossible, possibilities. In my experience, folks who take this approach often make earnest folks feel defensive, uncomfortable or frustrated. Nevertheless, we need people who help push us “use the future to imagine today”. Continue reading →
Over the past 22 years LandPaths’ dynamic, creative, and values-based approach to land stewardship has engendered widespread respect and tremendous community support. This is staffed by 17 consummate cooperators and operate in a wide range of partnerships. They successfully fund-raise to provide scholarships for many educational programs targeting youth from Santa Rosa and Sonoma County.
Pictures and brief descriptions of “a new breed of affordable shelter for travelers” in Colorado (Breckenridge, Boulder, Denver); California (Trukee and San Clemente) and Whistler, BC; Ludlow, VT; Ellijay, GA, and Whitefish, MT.
Mint Hut, Alaska, courtesy Backpacker Magazine
2. View with a Room: America’s Best Huts byWilliam M. Rochfort, Jr., in Backpacker Magazine, Oct. 2017, p. 49-69.
A nice photo spread with brief descriptions featuring 12 huts, cabins, yurts, fire towers, and climbing basecamps. Several of these descriptions are at least partially available online: e.g.Mint Hutin Alaska and at https://www.backpacker.com/author/william-m-rochfort-jr. There is very brief notice of another 6 huts. And also included is a compelling essay “Cabin Convert” by Jonathan Waterman [any relation to the mountaineering Waterman’s of Vermont?] about overcoming half a lifetime’s reactionary dislike of huts by rediscovering the pleasures of hut-to-hut in the San Juan Hut system.
[BTW, the catchy title, View with a Room, is understandably popular to describe mountain huts. There are a number of B&B’s by that name, and it is also the title of a great book about the lodging system in Glacier National Park by Ray Djuff and Chris Morrison (View with a Room: Glacier’s Historic Hotels and Chalets, Faircountry Press, 2001.]
The American Prairie Reserve’s (APR) hut system is a key part of the public access and education mission of this ambitious, privately-operated public land project that is gradually knitting 3,00,000 acres of public and private lands into a vast bioregional wildlife reserve. What kind of background and experience does one look for in hiring someone for such an undertaking? This is the story Mike Kautz’s path to a leadership role in founding a ground-breaking hut system.
Mike’s journey to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity began in Maine with schoolteacher parents, with whom he developed an early love of the Maine woods and all things out-of-doors. While studying arts and humanities at Middlebury – a liberal arts college in Vermont — a friend recommended Mike to fill in for her for a summer job in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s (AMC) huts (she had decided to go to NOLS instead). This happy accident turned into a ten-year stint working in the AMC huts. He worked in the huts four summers in a row, for several years as a seasonal worker, and eventually became AMC’s fulltime Hut Manager from 2004 to 2007. Mike loved the sense of conviviality among both the “Croo” and the many hikers coursing through the huts.
At AMC Mike developed an enduring interest in working for conservation-related causes. He was deeply influenced by Andy Fallender, former Executive Director of the AMC, who stressed that hut jobs went beyond hospitality to include education, stressing that the Croo’s job was to aid in “moving people through a conservation continuum”. AMC also connected him to a large network, some of whom have made backcountry lodging a profession, including: Jesse Bellingham (Director of Lodging for the American Alpine Club), Tom Callahan (Executive Director of Alaska Huts Association), Paul Cunha (VP of Operations, AMC), and James Wrigley (Huts Manager, AMC).
Sunset on the Prairie, photo by Mike Kautz
Mike as construction supervisor
After AMC, Mike enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Montana in creative writing, where he honed his classroom presentation skills and continued to work on his own creative expression. He then taught writing and photography workshops internationally for National Geographic, taught literature in Turkey for a year as a Fulbright Fellow, and taught ESL at Montana State University. While then While he liked teaching, he missed being outdoors and working in conservation.
Working for Jeff Brown (a former AMC huts manager) at the Yellowstone Institute Field School for 3.5 years, Mike ran the Lamar Buffalo Ranch. There he managed lodging and field operations and supported a wide range of educational programs. This position deepened his management and hospitality skills, and grounded him in creative partnership methods for managing public lands.
Mike’s next move brought him ever closer to APR: working in the startup phase of Adventure Scientists, which operates citizen-science projects all over the world. For 3 years he managed data collection projects, including an APR wildlife baseline data study (through camera tracking and transects). Spending lots of time on the prairie engendered a love the subtle and spare beauty of the prairie and admiration for APR’s mission and organizational ethos. He witnessed the profound responses of volunteer citizen scientists to places and to wildlife as they practiced close observation. This reinforced the power of meaningful exposure to a landscape in engendering genuine appreciation and a sense of commitment to environmental protection.
As Adventure Scientist’s liaison to APR, Mike attended their annual Transect where an interdisciplinary group stays in tents and moves together across the landscape for ten days by foot, bike and canoe. He marveled at the learning and sharing that went on around the campfire and along the trail, and discovered that APR was approaching a crucial moment in its evolution: after 15 years of focus on acquiring land, fundraising and building an organization, APR was ready to invite more visitors to the reserve and launch a new phase in its educational agenda. The staff of APR was exploring how best to encourage people to visit this remote, harsh, and little-known prairie landscape.
This got Mike thinking about how hut systems allow people to move safely and gently through a range of environments, and support them in immersive listening and learning. He began to envision the APR as a vast laboratory to test ideas about how facilities can, in Fallenders’s words, “move people through a conservation continuum.” He shared his observations and experiences with APR, suggesting that huts could be a way to get people to come for recreation, but at the same time build a connection to the landscape that fosters a commitment to conservation.
It soon became clear that a prairie hut system was an innovative way for APR to realize its public access and educational goals, and that Mike was the perfect person to serve as its first Visitation and Huts Manager.
Mike Quist Kautz on the job
Photo by Mike Kautz
Why Mike? For one thing, he has a broad perspective on the task at hand. In addition to working in one of the nation’s largest hut systems, he came to know huts in Europe and New Zealand in his travels. However, while running the AMC’s hut system was about continuing a tradition and unswervingly maintaining a set of time-tested systems and procedures, the APR and its hut system are both startup organizations, requiring vision, flexibility and imagination. Mike has experience in both following a plan and in “making it up as you go”. This prepares him to help build new approaches to backcountry safety, logistics and hospitality in the nation’s first hut system not located in the mountains.
While Mike is the point person and has unique knowledge of how hut systems operate, he is hardly the only one at APR contributing to developing the hut system. Partners include land management folks, marketing and PR staff, scientists, operations staff, fundraisers, board members, volunteers, and administrators. His background in non-profit management in a variety of settings makes it easy for him to operate effectively within a larger organization, especially one as innovative, values-based, and unique as APR.
As a writer, photographer, and humanist, Mike is great at connecting the dots to create a compelling narrative. He understands his work on operational, scientific and technical endeavors through a liberal arts lens. He approaches his work as a humanist and an artist, as well as a manager and a skilled practitioner.
Finally, Mike’s sophistication with different forms of verbal and visual communication allow him to reach people in many different ways. He is accomplished in using maps, images and text in telling the story of the APR and the huts. Storytelling can inspire dreams when he talks about the prairie landscape and about the roles of huts. His commitment to conservation education, his realization that it needs to be based in a fun experience, and his diverse experience in teaching and learning are invaluable assets in this recreational and educational enterprise.
Mike clearly has the skill set, education and experience for the job, and he came by them in his own unique way. APR definitely has the financial and organizational capacity to develop something new on the American prairie! It will be fun to watch this hut system innovate!
Reflections on the position of Founding Hut Master in the 21st Century
I’ve published a number of profiles of hut and trails founders; each person and set of circumstances is different. While I’m not prepared to generalize across these stories, talking with Mike I began to see the outlines of a 21st century model for innovation in huts, for a new generation of Hut Masters, and for new approaches to public/private partnerships in conservation, recreation and education. Riffing on my conversation with Mike, following are some initial thoughts.
Mike and the APR are at the beginning of an ambitious undertaking; and they approach it as a commitment to creating a new model for public/private partnership in conservation, recreation and education. They are looking at what it takes to develop an innovative, educational, environmentally-sensitive hut system on private lands in 21st century.
The job of actually founding a hut system, bringing it to life, is a unique and rare calling. Like entrepreneur, farmer, conservationist and educator, the job of “hut master” is a richly interdisciplinary, creative undertaking. It requires: vision; mastery of a wildly diverse bundle of practical skills and technical knowledge; sophisticated people, political, and organizational skills; perseverance; flexibility; and an active imagination. The work is aided by the gift of creating a compelling narrative about the significance of preserving and enjoying a wild landscape — and, in APR’s case, a vanishing and largely unknown biome that once dominated a third of the continent – that is traversed by the hut system. This role goes way beyond safety, hospitality and recreation, and far into the realms of conservation and environmental education.
The ability to blend science, education, and practical know-how within a broad imaginative framework can be immensely helpful to the hut master. And the ability to make the educational dimensions of hut experience enjoyable, not dry and didactic, is a key to the success of any conservation education enterprise aiming to capture the imagination of young people.
As Andy Fallender said, guests may come to the hut experience for recreation, but through the efforts of the hut crew they gain they form a connection to the landscape that motivates them to protect it. This is hardly a new concept in the hut world, but its importance is underscored as we struggle to cultivate an ethos of biophilia and do as little harm as possible to the natural world.
American Prairie Reserve building their first two huts
By Sam Demas
The first two yurts of American Prairie Reserve planned 10 hut system are now subtly nestled in a remarkable prairie landscape in Montana. The interiors will be finished this fall, the interpretive program will be developed this winter, and the yurts will be open for adventurous environmental pilgrims in Spring 2018. The amazing American Prairie Reserve’s hut system will be:
the first in the USA not located in the mountains;
the first located on the threatened, sublimely beautiful great American prairie;
the second largest in the USA (after the 10th Mountain Division Huts);
the largest in the USA located on privately owned land;
operated as part of a huge nature reserve as and integral part of a strong conservation and education mission;
open to travel by hiking, biking and/or canoeing/kayaking; and
offering spacious, comfortable quarters with excellent amenities, with minimal environmental impact in a remote and rugged environment.
What follows is a brief preview, based on a visit in early September 2017, of what is coming soon on the great American Prairie. I hope to visit again next year and present a more complete report, based on the experience of staying in the huts, on this innovative, distinctly American hut system. For now much of the content below is derived from the APR website, from visiting the huts under construction, and from stimulating discussions with Mike Quist Kautz, Visitation and Huts Manager, who is leading the APR hut system development.
One of the APR Yurt Sites, near Judith River, Courtesy Mike Kautz (also the featured photo at the beginning of post)
Our mission is to create the largest nature reserve in the continental United States, a refuge for people and wildlife preserved forever as part of America’s heritage.
Operating since 2004 on the basis of an exemplary set of values, the APR is committed to a bioregional program of stitching together 3,000,000 acres of existing public lands (primarily BLM lands) using private land purchases. As their web site states, “When these fragmented public and private lands are connected, the Reserve will provide a continuous land area collaboratively managed for wildlife and recreation, the largest of its kind in the Lower 48 states.”
So far the non-profit APR has completed 25 land acquisitions transactions to build a habitat base of 353,104 acres:
86,586 acres are private lands owned by the Reserve
266,518 acres are public lands (federal and state) and leased by the Reserve
They operate on the basis of a rigorous scientific program and strive to foster strong working relationships with their neighbors — the current human occupants and users of large parts of this landscape.
This map gives a sense of the scale and nature of the challenge. The brown background is BLM land and the white is privately owned. The goal is to knit together 3,000,000 acres surrounding the Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument andCharles M. Russell National Wildlife Preserve to create the largest prairie reserve in the world. All this to help preserve and restore the land as close as possible to the landscape and wildlife Lewis and Clark encountered in this place in 1806.
American Prairie Reserve Current Habitat Map 2017, courtesy APR
The huts will be built on private lands owned by the APR. The purpose of the hut system is to advance the APR mission by providing affordable shelter and recreational opportunity for visitors interested in experiencing and learning about this unique ecosystem. Knowing a landscape engenders commitment to preserve it, and the hut system is being designed to aid in getting people to visit and come to appreciate the subtleties of the prairie.
Aerial View of Judith River Site – Courtesy APR
Conceptual plan for the APR Hut System
The prairie ecosystem of Central Montana is a spare and subtle environment — most folks fly or drive over it as quickly as possible. It is a rugged steppe-like environment with weather extremes, including low rainfall, intensely slippery muds and dangerous roads, and is remote from gas, cell reception, and life safety services. It requires serious shelter and planning to visit, and a slow, thoughtful pace to truly appreciate.
The hut system is conceived as a means of giving a wide range of visitors the rare opportunity to safely, comfortably, and affordably experience one of America’s iconic — and disappearing — landscapes. How do you provide public access to a privately owned nature reserve? How do you direct people to he places you want them to visit and keep them away from ecologically fragile areas? These are the essential challenges of designing this kind of hut system.
Mike Quist Kautz, Director of Visitation and clerk of the works
The idea of a hut system grew from multiple stimuli: the experiences folks have had through APR’s amazing annual “Transect” program and its Kestrel Camp program of trips for board members and donors, from precedents including the Appalachian Mountain Club huts, New Zealand DOC huts and Great Walks, and from the vision of Mike Quist Kautz and others that huts are an ideal way to introduce people to this unique landscape.
Eventually 10 huts — ideally placed a days hike, bike or river trip apart — will provide a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in this rich ecosystem. Each hut will feature a different facet of the Reserve and have its own interpretive theme. In combination, the total experience of these 10 huts will cultivate appreciation of the the range of biodiversity, the threats, and special thrills of this subtle and vast landscape. At one time xx %of the America was dominated by prairie.
The map below presents the conceptual plan for a 10 hut system, and the following picture is an artist’s representation of the hut designs.
American Prairie Reserve Hut System Plan
American Prairie Reserve Yurt Design Scheme, courtesy APR
The first two yurts: design, amenities and operation
Viewed from a distance on this grassland system, these two structures evoke a Mongolian steppe settlement or, in some ways, a spaceship landing in the outback. The two yurts, designed and built by Shelter Designs (shelterdesigns.net) of Missoula, MT, are grand embodiments of the yurt/hut genre. They comprise three modules each: a 30′ diameter common area, a 30′ diameter sleeping yurt (with the space divided into four sleeping rooms, each accommodating two twin beds, and one also including a bunk bed), and a commodious bathroom yurt. These are unusually commodious spaces for a hut system.
Upper site near the Missouri Breaks
Lower site in Cottonwood Gallery
One yurt is located by the rushing Judith River sheltered by a beautiful and increasingly scarce Cottonwood Gallery of majestic old trees. The other is higher in elevation and a nice hike away from the bench providing a dramatic Missouri River overlook (in the Missouri Breaks), featuring views of the historic confluence of the Missouri and Judith Rivers (see also featured photo for this post).
The entire yurt will be rented to a single party, on the model of the US Forest Service cabins common in the Western US. Prices are not yet set, but the intent is to make them affordable.
At each of the two sites there are two large yurts plus a smaller one for toilet
Spacious 30′ diameter Yurts
Unique cable system to prevent roof blowing off in high winds
Yurts will have an unusually high level of amenities for a hut system. Full kitchen facilities will include propane stove, refrigerator, pots and pans and eating utensils, and sink. The huts will be available as self-serve (bring your own food and cook on site) or “catered” (food provided and you cook it yourself). Provision of guided trips is under consideration. Both huts are on ranch roads that allow for provisioning. Drinking water and food will be trucked in. Solar collectors will provide power for lights, heat, refrigerator, air conditioning (!), and charging of personal devices. Description from their website of toilets by Toilet Tech Solutions:
Toilet Tech offers a low-cost and low-hazard solution for waterless human waste management at high use sites. Toilet Tech’s urine diverting toilets are superior to: expensive barrel fly out toilets, hazardous and ineffective conventional composting toilets, and water polluting pit toilets. 100% of urine is diverted and treated onsite by native or engineered soil. Fecal matter and toilet paper are consumed by invertebrates (TTS-Decompose), or dried and burned onsite (TTS-Waste Away) leaving little residue. No bulking agent is required. Stabilized waste extraction is very infrequent. Odor is very low.
Graywater will be collected in buckets in the kitchen area and hauled to the septic system behind the bathroom for disposal.
Biking will be on existing ranch roads. Other recreational pathways are still under consideration. In addition to using existing trails (human and wildlife), walking routes will be created de novo by users in some areas as part of a grand vision with conservation, recreation and educational dimensions intertwined. APR promotes a form of walking they call “snorkeling” (making ones way slowly across the trackless landscape and becoming attuned to its subtle pleasures). Canoeing and kayaking routes are under consideration.
The initial target audience will be native Montanans who are familiar with the great plains environment, experienced in traveling rough terrain and harsh climate, and overall have the outdoor skill set for this adventure experience. Doubtless the demographic will evolve over time, and I predict many Europeans will eventually find and treasure this hut system.
This hut system is off to a fabulous start in developing infrastructure to give the user an experience of the larger meaning of prairies by recalling the American prairie as it existed when Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea came through in 1805 and 1806.
Next Steps:
APR hopes to continue development of its hut system by opening one or two more huts in 2019. As the first American hut system not located in the mountains, they have an incredible opportunity to experiment with a wide range of hut designs appropriate to the weather and terrain. The inclusion of Indigenous architectural traditions, such as cabins and shelters dug into the hillsides (and perhaps some contemporary architectural riffs on these and other building traditions) might result in an architectural showcase of shelter types as well as demonstrating a high level of environmentally sustainable amenities. And the potential for the huts as infrastructure for innovative environmental education by APR is incredibly exciting!
Stay tuned and get ready to book a trip next year!
Americans love to hike their 167,00 miles of trails located on federal and state lands. We are building new trails to meet demand, and trail use is projected to continue increasing. But how do Americans feel about placing hut systems on some fraction of their trails? How do we feel as a nation about hut-to-hut hiking, skiing and biking? No one knows. It’s worth talking about.
[Editors note: To me, this story demonstrates how an excited group of young people can inspire others to join them in establishing an extensive trail and cabin system. The Dartmouth Outdoor Club (DOC) was an expression of the amazing conservation movement in the USA in the early 20th century. This outbreak of environmental fervor — led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and many others — inspired the development of the National Parks System of the U.S. and fostered greater environmental activism and consciousness in the U.S. population. This conservation movement also inspired a large-scale collegiate Outing Club movement that started at Dartmouth. In one generation the DOC developed a system of over 35 huts on trails leading from the Connecticut River in Hanover, N.H. into the heart of the White Mountains. I am grateful to David Hooke, author of Reaching That Peak: 75 Years of the Dartmouth Outing Club (1987), for kindly agreeing to write a brief summary of the origins and development of this collegiate cabin and trail system. — Sam Demas]
Dartmouth College, in Hanover New Hampshire, was a successful but quiet and remote outpost of North American higher education by the first decade of the 1900s. All-male from its founding in 1769, the college of 1909 was a lonely, even unhealthy place. Fall and spring dances were the only times that women were invited on campus; as result, winter was dismal, characterized buy “stuffy rooms, hot stoves, card games and general sluggishness resulting from lack of exercise.” Students and faculty alike were bored and looking for new possibilities.
In my work on community-based, regional and long-distance trails for the National Park Service, I have found that working with artists is an effective way to draw new visitors and to deepen the experience of current trail users. Connecting with new audiences to national parks and national trails through art is also recognized by the National Park Service as the “Arts Afire” national strategy in our recent“Call to Action”–plan for the NPS Centennial in 2016. The “Arts Afire”strategy is to “showcase the meaning of parks and trails to new audiences through dance, music, visual arts, writing, and social media.
Mike’s journey to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity began in Maine with schoolteacher parents, with whom he developed an early love of the Maine woods and all things out-of-doors. While studying arts and humanities at Middlebury – a liberal arts college in Vermont — a friend recommended Mike to fill in for her for a summer job in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s (AMC) huts (she had decided to go to NOLS instead). This happy accident turned into a ten-year stint working in the AMC huts. He worked in the huts four summers in a row, for several years as a seasonal worker, and eventually became AMC’s fulltime Hut Manager from 2004 to 2007. Mike loved the sense of conviviality among both the “Croo” and the many hikers coursing through the huts.
