Peter Rabbit's Hut

My adventure last weekend started after work Friday evening. JP and I were all geared up and excited to camp in the “Peter Rabbit” hut on the Berthoud Pass. This hut is an old forest service hut that had been boarded up for the last couple of decades. This year the powers that be (I have no idea who) open the hut for backcountry visitation on the backcountry honor system. Which is basically stated;
Respect the wilderness, wildlife and clean up after yourself.
With fully loaded overnighter packs we headed out to find the hut just pass dusk. We had a GPS waypoint of the hut’s location and JP had a pretty good idea of its whereabouts after riding by it the weekend before. But after bushwhacking through waist deep powder in single digit temperatures for about two hours and getting as close as 300 feet away from the hut (according to the GPS) we had no luck actually finding the hut that night! So we reverted to plan “B” (always have a plan B in the BC) which was camping in the nearby Mary-Jane parking lot. We had a very comfortable evening with a small fire, a few beers and lots of laughs.
The next day we woke up bright and early, had a small breakfast (breakfast burritos), drove to the trailhead parking lot and started tromping up the now obvious snow packed trail toward the hut. The hut was a short snowshoe (3/4 mile) and was in great shape as backcountry huts go. It was clean and well kept with all kinds of great keepsakes people had left through out the years. It had a wood burning stove and was stalked with extra sleeping bags, kitchen pot and pans, a lantern, a first aid kit, a dream catcher, a hippy drum, a wood ax and saw, some candles, an extra pair of snowshoes, books, and a hut journal. We didn’t stay long that morning because we were excited to get up to the summit and look for safe powder lines down the peaks….so we continued to shoed up the mountain…