The Winter Adventure Guide

Five Reasons to Love the Appalachian Mountain Club

Photograph by Jerry and Marcy Monkman

Historic bragging rights
The nation’s oldest recreation and conservation group was founded here in Boston in 1876 by an MIT physicist named Edward Pickering, who invited fellow brainiacs and outdoors enthusiasts to join him in exploring the White Mountains. Today the club, which focuses on conservation and education throughout New England, is headquartered on Beacon Hill and has more than 100,000 members in 12 chapters, from Maine to Washington, DC.

Huts
In 1888 the club built the first of eight communal huts along the Appalachian Trail, and trekkers have been overnighting in the White Mountain National Forest ever since. Based on similar dwellings in the Alps, the popular huts hold from 36 to 90 people at a time, and in summer the overnight fee includes dinner and breakfast. Three huts are open in winter: Lonesome Lake, Zealand Falls, and Carter Notch. Guests cook their own food. Snowshoe the six-mile Zealand Hut trek, or go with a guide. As you walk, the naturalists will tell you all about wintertime birds and other life in the hardwood forests; at night, you’ll bunk by the warmth of a wood stove. Upcoming trips include the family-friendly Carter Notch Hut climb (leaving from Pinkham Notch on February 15) and the 1.6-mile Lonesome Lake walk through Franconia Notch State Park (February 23). Reservations required.

Camps
The AMC’s sporting camp-to-camp network in Maine’s North Woods is a new variation of its hut-to-hut system in the Whites. With the camps spaced seven to 10 miles apart, adventurers can snowshoe, cross-country ski, or dogsled from one to the next, creating the perfect adventure. Each of the staffed camps offers lodging and meals, and the circa-1873 Little Lyford Lodge and Cabins even has a sauna. The AMC runs two- and four-night guided trips in February and early March, or you can opt to do the trail network on your own through the end of March. For families with children, the AMC recommends the tame 8.7-mile route around Shaw Mountain, which has stunning views. Add moose, beaver, fox, and the priceless sound of that laughing loon echoing across the lonely expanse, and you have one sweet American safari. Reservations required. For guided tours, two-night, all- inclusive rates start at $343 for adult AMC members and $387 for adult nonmembers.

Variety
Club members like to balance their environmental activism with outdoor recreation, particularly hiking and backpacking. There’s also cross-country skiing, whitewater and flatwater canoeing and kayaking, sea kayaking, sailing, rock climbing, and cycling. The AMC’s 2,700 volunteers lead roughly 7,000 trips and activities each year. Example: The club teaches its introductory ice-climbing course February 26–28 at the legendary Frankenstein Cliff in New Hampshire’s Crawford Notch State Park. In no time at all, you’ll be scampering like Spiderman up frozen waterfalls.

Vision
For years the club has been buying up camps and property, including 37,000 acres in the 100-Mile Wilderness region, which is almost sacred land for hikers. This last leg of the Appalachian Trail is a region of seemingly endless forest, mountains, lakes, and too many ponds to count. “The ponds here are the most beautiful, remote bodies of water you can possibly imagine,” says AMC executive director Andy Falender. Last November, the AMC expanded its territory and sporting camps by more than 29,000 acres, broadening recreation opportunities for all New Englanders. The purchase “was the missing piece,” Falender says. “With adjoining land owned by the state and the Nature Conservancy, [the purchase] preserves a 63-mile corridor for outdoor lovers and wildlife.”

For more information on the AMC, go to outdoors.org. For reservations, call 603-466-2727.