Last month I got an opportunity to head down south and spend 2 nights at the Opus Hut near Ophir Pass. It was sort of a last-minute invite that I was able to say yes to on a whim, and it turned into an awesome weekend of powder skiing and hut time with a great crew. Sometimes it’s really nice when a spontaneous plan comes together. The Opus Hut sits at 11,765 ft just to the east of Ophir Pass. It was built by Ophir resident Bob Kingsley, a master timber framer, between 2006 and 2011 after he bought the parcel of land the hut sits on. Keep Reading…
Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year as they say, is officially here. As the holiday crowds descend from all over the world upon Colorado’s mountain towns, Anna-Lisa and I have made it a tradition to escape the madness and head up to a 10th Mountain or Braun hut for a night or two on or around Christmas. This year we decided to book out the Markley Hut, which features one of the shortest approaches of any hut in the system. Keep Reading…
Over the past several years I’ve been slowly but surely ticking off the different huts of the 10th Mountain Division and Braun Hut systems, with the loose goal of eventually visiting them all. It’s a cool goal because for one, each hut is unique and offers up a different experience – whether it be the hut’s location, the access to ski terrain or peaks nearby, or the distinctive architecture of the hut itself. But beyond that, hut trips are always a great excuse to get different groups of people together, and the memories created over the years begin to stack up after awhile. Read more…
A hut trip to Janet’s Cabin has been on my Colorado bucket list for years. As a lifetime skier of Copper Mountain, I’ve always known that there was a hidden cabin way up in the woods somewhere beyond the gate of West Ten Mile, the most westerly run on the mountain. I had skied past the gate dozens of times and pondered an outing beyond the rope lines. I had also seen plenty of fully loaded snowshoers and skiers riding the Kokomo and Lumberjack lifts en-route to a stay at the hut. Keep Reading…
