In 1998 Sam Demas took a short sabbatical after leaving his job at Cornell University and before starting a new job as college librarian at Carleton. He headed to Europe, where he walked “hut to hut” for six weeks in the Alps, amazed by the network of rustic accommodations for hikers and skiers on mountain trails. He fell in love with the activity, which he describes as a “personal pilgrimage,” and which has a long history in Europe, but was then and is still relatively unknown in the United States.
Shortly after starting at Carleton, Demas met another new staff member, Laurel Bradley, who was director and curator of the college’s art museum — now the Perlman Teaching Museum. Bradley shared Demas’s love for the outdoors and together they enjoyed hut-to-hut hiking and skiing in Europe, New Zealand, Slovenia, and Patagonia, among other places. The couple co-led a hut-to-hut trek in Northern Greece in 2007 as part of Carleton’s Alumni Adventures program, and married in 2011 — the same year Demas retired from Carleton. In retirement, Demas visited and studied U.S. hut systems, started the website hut2hut.info, and quickly became a leading authority on hut-to-hut travel. When Bradley retired in 2017, Demas decided it was time to write a guidebook for the U.S. hut-to-hut systems, and he asked Bradley to be his coauthor.
“I said, ‘I’ll be going on the trips anyway, so why not?’” recalls Bradley. The resulting book, Hut to Hut USA, the Complete Guide for Hikers, Bikers, and Skiers, was written over the course of two years and 599 trail miles. Demas and Bradley have included maps and itineraries for 16 hut-to-hut trips in the lower 48 states and Alaska. Combining the text with beautiful photographs, the authors share their experiences at various sites, advise readers how to plan and prepare for their own adventures, and inform Americans about the larger cultural and international context of hut-to-hut travel.
What did researching and writing the book teach them? “We’ve always known that we travel well together,” says Bradley, “but we learned that we work together really well, so that was a relief. And I learned that I’m a lousy cross-country skier, but I did it!”