Last weekend I went on a hut trip. I had my friends Nick and Karen over for dinner a couple weeks ago, and they mentioned that they had some extra spots for a hut trip in a couple weeks, and asked me if I wanted to join them. At first I said no, because I didn’t think I had the proper gear. However, a couple days later they mentioned that they had a bunch of gear that I could borrow, and so I decided to go, since it seemed like potentially a once in a lifetime opportunity. I knew that booking these hut trips required a lot of advanced planning. I learned from them that it is even trickier than I thought. There is a lottery system. You put in an application listing which dates and locations you would most prefer, and you might get what you want. Nick has been on a number of these trips before; when he was younger it was easy to get a group of 16 people together to fill a hut. This year, he only reserved 8 spots, and we only ended up with 6. That meant that we ended up sharing the hut with another group of people. They only had 3 people. They were quite nice, and also very experienced with the hut system. I learned that it was the 10th mountain division hut system, which was established in the 1980s. It is actually pretty cheap – $40 per night per person. Since we only had 6 people instead of 8, it turned out to be a bit more, but still quite cheap.
Friday morning I woke up around 6 a.m. to get ready, including having a big breakfast with eggs, figuring I would need the energy. Nick and Karen picked me up around 7:15. We drove about 3.5 hours to get to the trailhead. The other car had gotten there before us, but not too long. We got our gear out and suited up. Originally I had planned to use a full body snowsuit that Nick had loaned me, but it was so sunny, I thought I would end up being too hot, so instead I just stuck with a light pair of waterproof pants over my jogging pants and a light jacket over my sweatshirt. Even that turned out to get me sweating quite a bit. It was only about 36F, but the Colorado sun is very intense, so it felt much warmer. We got on the trail around 11 a.m.
Karen and I were on snowshoes. The rest of the group was on back country skis. They have special skins you can attach to the skis which have a synthetic fur on them, so that they are slippery in one direction, but sticky in the opposite direction. That way when going uphill you don’t simply slide backwards. I had been worried that I would have trouble keeping up with the others, since I know that Nick and his friends are very fit, but we all ended up going about the same tempo, which was nice. I was very glad to be with experienced backcountry skiers, since it can be dangerous. In particular, one has to lookout for avalanche. Nick had a detailed map which indicated which areas might be prone to avalanche. When we got to those, we split up into groups of two, so that if something did happen, the others would be able to help the people in the avalanche. We each had an electronic beacon to show our location to the others. In the case of avalanche, the others would search for us, and then poke the probe into the snow until you found something, and then dig them out with the shovels we packed. Fortunately, we did not need any of that.
We arrived at the hut around 3 p.m. It was a four mile trek with elevation gain of about 2000 feet, most of which was in the second half of the trip. I was definitely ready for a break by the time we got there. My back was really aching from the heavy backpack. It is quite possible I did not have it adjusted quite right. It had been a long time since I had used a backpack, so I was not so familiar with how to adjust it. Also, I probably packed a bit too much food.
Food. The hut was well equipped with propane stoves (and also an old wood burning stove, which we did not use), pots and pans, plates and bowls, etc. But we had to bring our own food. And whatever waste we had, we had to bring out with us on Sunday. When we got to the hut, the other people we were sharing the hut with had just gotten back from skiing. They had already stayed one night there. We chatted with them a bit, and then got a fire going in the wood stove (not the cook stove). There was a large pot on top of this stove with a spigot for melting snow into water, which worked very well. We unpacked our stuff, relaxed a bit, and watched the sunset over the mountains. Nick got out some of the old log books from the hut and found some of their entries from previous trips, which were quite funny. Jan, Rebecca, and James made burritos for dinner. I was very impressed by the fanciness of the food for a camping trip, with several different kinds of salsa, fresh vegetables, etc. When I mentioned this to Nick, he said, “well, glamping”. That is, glamorous camping. True, we were not in tents, and the hut was very nice, but still, no running water and an outhouse, with a 4 mile hike in, feels like camping to me.
I went to bed by 9 p.m. on Friday, because I was very tired from the snowshoe hike. Unfortunately I did not sleep that soundly. I woke up around 3 a.m. with a very dry mouth. After probably 30 minutes of debate in my sleeping back, I decided that going to the outhouse might help me sleep better, which it probably did. Saturday I got up around 7 or 8 and helped Nick and Karen a bit with breakfast. They had brought scrambled eggs, sausage, and English muffins, which Karen buttered and then grilled in a pan. It was also very tasty. After cleaning up from breakfast we got our gear back on and headed up to nearby Prospect Peak, which took about an hour. There were beautiful views up there, and also peace. By that I mean absolute silence. When people stopped talking for a moment, there was absolutely no sound at all – no birds chirping, no wind whistling, no sound of cars or hum of electronics. Just silence. It was wonderful. When we got there, we saw our hut mates skiing down the nearby Charles Peak. Shortly thereafter they came over to us and told us that the snow was pretty good. Not great, as it has not snowed much in Colorado this year, and the sun makes the snow crusty, but still not too bad. Jan, James, and Rebecca went over to Charles Peak to do some downhill skiing. Nick, Karen, and I simply hiked back to the hut. I considered going on to Charles Peak. I think that going up would have been nice, but going down on snow shoes I would have been much slower than the others. In general, I like going uphill more than downhill. Yes, it is more strenuous, but I find it easier on the knees.
Saturday afternoon we relaxed in the hut around the fire, reading books, napping in the sunshine, and playing some games. I had brought the card game Set, which Nick and I played some. I had expected a bit more playing games, since I know Nick enjoys board games very much, but apparently this crowd was not the board game crowd. Oh well. For dinner, I made rice and beans, which turned out quite well. It is one of my go-to camping dishes, because it is cheap, easy to prepare, and nutritious. Nick and Karen brought tortilla chips and made fresh guacamole. I was really surprised that they brought fresh avocados. I would have assumed that they would get smushed in the backpack, but they survived the trip very nicely.
I stayed up a bit longer Saturday night, probably until 10 p.m. or so, and then I turned in. Once again, I did not sleep super soundly, and my mouth was very dry. When I went to the outhouse around 4 a.m., I saw that it was lightly snowing, which was very relaxing. We woke up around 7 to about 2 inches of fresh snow. Jan, James, and Rebecca made breakfast – oatmeal with mushrooms topped with a fried egg. I had never had savory oatmeal like that before. It was quite tasty. I might incorporate it into my repertoire as well. After breakfast we packed up and made sure we did all the things on the list for checking out, like sweeping the floors, chopping wood and stocking the kindling boxes, bringing in snow to melt for water and so on. I also wrote a bit about our trip in the log book (and realized later that my end date was wrong – it should have been March 1st, not February 29th). We hit the trail around 11 a.m. and got back to the car around 2 p.m. Even though it had snowed a bit and was mostly cloudy, it also had warmed up to about 47 by the time we got to the car, so there was not much snow left the last part of the trail and it was quite muddy. We hit the road around 2 p.m. and got home around 6 p.m.
OpenClaw
At work, AI is all the rage. Recently a coworker created ClawPress, a way to connect OpenClaw to WordPress so that AI can write blog posts for you. I decided to give it a try today. I gave it these instructions
Draft a new blog post titled Peter Estin Hut trip. Don’t publish it yet. I want it to mention that I went on a hut trip last weekend near Eagle. We started at 9000 feet and hiked 4 miiles on snow shoes to 11,000 feet to get to the hut, carrying food and supplies for the weekend.
This is what it drafted – not bad:
Last weekend I headed out for a hut trip near Eagle, Colorado, making my way to the Peter Estin Hut. The adventure started at 9,000 feet, where we strapped on snowshoes and set off into the backcountry, climbing 2,000 feet over four miles of snow-covered terrain to reach the hut at 11,000 feet.
We carried everything we needed for the weekend on our backs — food, gear, and supplies — which made the ascent a genuine workout. The snowpack was solid and the trail wound through quiet winter forest, rewarding every step with increasingly open views of the surrounding mountains.
Arriving at the hut after that kind of effort makes settling in all the sweeter. There is something deeply satisfying about earning your shelter the hard way, then spending the evening warm and well-fed while the cold settles in outside.
Next I asked it to add some images. I gave it a url to a Google Photos album I had made from the trip.
Add some pictures from this google photos album: <redacted> Don’t add photos which are near duplicates.
It said that it found 30 images and was processing them. I let it go for about 10 minutes or so, and started adding more text to add to the post and added that to the queue. Then I got impatient, because it seemed like it wasn’t doing anything or was stuck. I ended up refreshing the browser page, which meant I lost the 5 paragraphs of text I had queued :( I had a suspicion that might happen. I should have copy/pasted it to be safe. Oh well. After I refreshed the page, I then scrolled back up in the conversation and saw that it had done a bunch of stuff, including installing a bunch of linux packages with apt-get. That made me a bit nervous, but also happy that I had decided to be cautious and I installed it on a fresh VPS which only costs about $5 a month. It finally told me that 22 images was too many. There was a max of 20. I am not sure where that max comes from. I then told it to choose 10. I was not really happy with the ones it chose, so I ended up choosing my own.
So maybe I was asking a bit too much of OpenClaw for now, but knowing that it can create draft blog posts with pictures from my Google Photos seems quite handy. Adding images is one of the parts of blogging that usually takes the longest for me. Having an AI agent do that in the background for me seems nice. I am still not certain that I want AI to write for me. I actually enjoy writing on my blog. That is one of the reasons that I started a blog to begin with. The act of writing helps me process my thoughts. I find that is particularly important when I write technical posts. Even when I am writing about hiking or biking, the act of writing helps cement the memories in my mind. Often, I forget many of the details as the years go by, but then I can go back to the blog and be reminded of them, which is also fantastic.
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