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Trip Report    

Intermediate Snowshoe - MTTA High Hut

A pleasant overnight snowshoe to MTTA High Hut with great company but few views due to cloudy weather.

David Bradley David Bradley
March 07, 2017
  • Snow and ice on road

  • The traditional route follows a cat track maintained by the MTTA.  The route was in great condition both ascending on Saturday and descending Sunday morning.  Signage is excellent too.

    The upper Sno-Park lot was closed so we started out from the lower lot.  This added about 650' of elevation gain: 2350' total gain vs. 1700' gain from the upper lot.

Our group of 8 spent Saturday night at High Hut.   The entire trip went very smoothly with no issues except that cloudy weather hid the longer-distance views.   The highlight in terms of scenery was when we left the Hut Sunday morning and began our descent.  There had been about a foot of new snow overnight, and it  was a joy to pass through the pristine snow covered alpine landscape in full morning light.

The Hut is open to everyone during the day, but we had no visitors during our stay.  We had the entire Hut to ourselves from about 2pm Saturday until about 9:30am Sunday.

The MTTA website does not make clear some of the details about staying overnight at High Hut, so here are things that may be useful to future overnight visitors:

  • The 8 sleeping spots are as follows: one bunk bed downstairs (two people), one queen size fold out futon downstairs (two people), four  thick cushions for sleeping on the floor upstairs (four people).  There is no need to bring sleep pads with you.
  • The hut has electric lights powered by a solar + battery system.  We had most of the lights on on most of the evening until about 10pm, and the battery still showed 50% full when we went to bed.
  • Every overnight party is expected to do some chores before leaving, consisting mainly of shoveling out all of the major walkways and sweeping out the Hut.  There are several walkways upstairs (emergency exit) and downstairs plus the path leading to the outhouse, so the shoveling is best split across multiple people.  Shovels are provided.
  • The Hut provides everything required for melting snow, including large buckets for hauling it in, big melting pots that sit permanently on the fireplace, and a large urn-style water filter for doing final filtering of the melted snow.  It all worked excellently, but beware that the filtering is a bit slow so it's important to anticipate group water needs in advance (filling bottles in the morning before the hike out, etc)