Known as one of the most influential environmental grassroots organizations, the Sierra Club has long since had a mission to protect America’s natural and wild places. Formed more than 125 years ago (one of its first members was John Muir), the Sierra Club has several ways to help others enjoy the terra they’re protecting and forge their own memories within famous mountaineers’ footsteps.
In the Tahoe Sierra, the Sierra Club maintains four backcountry ski huts that offer respite for explorers who go long distances in the cold, chilly months. Each cabin provides shelter for up to 15 people but little else…hikers must bring their own sleeping materials, food, candles, utensils, et cetera, just like you would be hiking the PCT.
According to its 2018-19 brochure, “With good weather, each cabin can be reached in one day or less from the nearest road by an average group. In bad weather, some may not be accessible at all.”
The huts are out there, far away from any civilization. Depending on the snowpack in any given year, the huts get buried. Since it’s so far to each of the huts, most people walk to one of them from a main road, stay a night or two, and walk out. It’s best to go with a group, reserve your spot ahead of time, and bring shovels, candles, and avalanche gear. The Sierra Club does not provide directions to the huts so anyone venturing out in the Sierra backcountry should have good navigation skills. Personally, I went to some of the huts in the summertime just to get a sense of where they were at, but the best is to go with people who’ve been to them before. Here are some general descriptions of the huts:
Peter Grubb Hut
Ten years ago, I went with my brother to meet a group at the Peter Grubb Hut. One of our other buddies rented out the whole hut in early March. Equipped with a shovel, probe, beacon, sleeping bag, clothes, flashlights, my snowboard, and snowshoes, we made the first rookie mistake—we got a late start. We parked near the base of Castle Pass and Boreal at 3 p.m. and started snowshoeing 800 feet uphill for two miles.
Two miles doesn’t sound far, but when you’re carrying a heavy pack and your snowboard, the trail is poorly marked and you don’t really know where you’re going, and it gets dark early, then it helps to have friends who paved the way for you. They put ribbons out for us in the trees, and we could see their footsteps in the snow. We climbed the ridge and as it started to get dark, we saw lights blinking in a grove of trees which led us there. Our friends had cooked dinner and brought a pony keg of Great Basin brew, and it was the best-tasting beer of my life. We stayed there for two days, making ski jumps, playing cards, and hanging out in the snow before going back to the base.
Benson Hut and Bradley Huts
Most people who hike to the Benson Hut, which is under the northern face of the Anderson Peak ridge, start on the western side near Sugar Bowl and hike south towards Olympic Valley. The hut is about six miles south of Donner Pass Road. You must be an advanced or expert backcountry skier to get there—it’s a steep 1200-ft. hike up to the top, climbing over Mt. Lincoln and through the Lincoln-Judah saddle. There are scary cornices, and wind-stripped snow on the ridges exposing bare ground and ice, and in heavy snow years, you might not even be able to find it. In the 2016-17 season, Benson was buried under 35 feet of snow. “People were calling us and looking for it. I told them they should get their probe out,” one Sierra Club volunteer said.
But then when you find it, it’s pretty awesome. You can see over the backside of Northstar California out to Diamond Peak on the eastern end, and all of Truckee and out to I-80 to the south. The views to the northwest are obscured by amazing peaks, aka the cliffs that point up to the ridgeline to Tinker Knob. Along with the picture postcard mountainscape all around you, the Benson Hut has fold-out bunk beds downstairs in the same room as the wood-burning stove. The only downside is that “Ken’s Place”, the two-story outhouse, is a hundred feet away from the hut.
Almost seven miles southwest of the Benson Hut is the Bradley Hut. Most people park near Pole Creek Road and hike up to it six miles away. The Bradley Hut was built in 1997-98, originally in the Granite Chief Wilderness area, but they had to move it. They wanted to just pick it up by helicopter and move to it to its new location, but plans fell through, so they broke it down and rebuilt it in this spot.
At a summertime Sierra Club Hut work party, Hut Coordinator Dick Simpson and his crew were fixing things at Bradley, restocking wood, and generally getting it ready for wintertime use. Simpson went on his first Sierra Club trip in 1970 to the Peter Grubb Hut and by 1975, he was organizing Sierra Club hut work parties. He met his wife on a winter backpacking hut trip, and they currently have a cabin on Donner Summit.
In the Bradley Hut, Simpson points out the solar panels, “but when we get too many snowstorms then it doesn’t charge,” he admits. The Peter Grubb hut is the best one for solar panels because it faces south but both the Benson and Ludlow hut face north and there are a lot of trees over the roofs, so they don’t get much sun.
For those who want to go hut to hut and are lucky enough to get reservations at different huts on successive days, you can start at one end of the Clair Tappaan Lodge/Pole Creek Trailhead and finish at the other but spend at least two nights at one of the huts so that you’re not just hiking the entire time. That route is a good 17-20 miles in the snow.
Simpson has done the Benson to Bradley route, but only once about 25 years ago right after the Bradley Hut opened. However, he admits they started their trip too late, and it was sketchy getting to the Bradley Hut since it gets dark so early in the winter.
“It takes at least three days to hike from hut to hut, but the reservation system can be kind of tough to navigate to get subsequent nights at different huts booked at the same time,” Simpson warns.
Ludlow Hut
Way down on the west side of Lake Tahoe, off Highway 89 and between Tahoma and Meeks Bay out in the western backcountry, is the Ludlow Hut. It’s six miles up McKinney Road between Sourdough Hill and Lost Corner Mountain, next to Richardson Lake. The total elevation gain is a thousand feet, and the hut is hidden in the trees a bit, but it’s fun to poke around on your skis in the meadow and/or along the Richardson Lake shoreline once you get there. Many people park at Sugar Pine State Park and pay the $5 fee before hiking to this A-frame.
A Benson to Ludlow Combination
If you’re trying to hit up all the huts in a single trip, then you may need at least a couple of weeks to do it since Peter Grubb and Bradley huts are kind of the outliers.
“One group I know of did all four huts in one trip, but that was at least 20 years ago,” Simpson says. “I know they camped in the snow one or two nights,” he adds. A Google map shows the route from Clair Tappaan Lodge to the Ludlow Hut following the Pacific Crest Trail being 34.3 miles and taking 15 hours to hike—and that’s not in the snow.
A Memorable Experience
While hiking to the Sierra Club huts is not for the faint of heart (even in the summer), hanging out with your friends in a well-kept primitive cabin for a couple of days in the snowy backcountry is bound to forge unforgettable memories. It’s the reason why many visitors have such a good time that they emerge from the Tahoe wilderness and immediately ask their friends, “When are we going back?”
