AMC Action Plan for 2025-30

[sierra]

I think that the above-treeline huts are the most important of all for consolidating human waste that is transported out by helicopter to a sewage treatment plant. This service alone was incredibly important during the onslaught multitude of temporary hikers during the first year of the pandemic, a time when the huts were otherwise closed for lodging and meals, which was a huge financial hit for the AMC, as the huts are the cash cow that supports other services like education programs, trail construction, and the MWI.

In reply to TomK’s comment about buying baked goods at the huts, please keep doing that one and all, as all that cash goes directly to the not so highly paid hut croos.

If the huts were not there, there would not be a need to helicopter out barrels of human waste. A few years ago, the barrels left outside Madison hut leaked fecal matter for sometime before they were able to get them out of there. I find it interesting that the AMC supporters have zero issue justifying the hut system, yet when Presby wanted to build a hotel up on the cone next to HIS train tracks, it was travesty that could never be let to happen, hypocrisy at the highest level.

 

[pwsull]

2023 they had ~$60 million in revenue, ~$40 million in expenses, and over $200 million in assets.

I grew up in a non-outdoors family and back in the 1960’s back pack trips with my camp to Lakes of the Clouds was my introduction to a lifelong love of the White Mountain National Forest and its peaks. Later the huts offered the opportunity to introduce my children to that same love and awe until they were old enough to rough it in the wilderness without a roof and prepared meals. The huts are an invaluable resource to introduce people to an awesome natural wilderness gently. Without them, not sure my kids or I would be lifelong participants in and advocates for the WMNF.

As for the money aspect of the AMC, we can all complain about “The Appalachian Money Club” but for anyone involved in non profit organizations those numbers quoted above are actually pretty modest including the CEO’s $300K salary. You just wouldn’t find someone qualified to do that job for less.

 

[Dr. Dasypodidae]

If the huts were not there, there would not be a need to helicopter out barrels of human waste. A few years ago, the barrels left outside Madison hut leaked fecal matter for sometime before they were able to get them out of there. I find it interesting that the AMC supporters have zero issue justifying the hut system, yet when Presby wanted to build a hotel up on the cone next to HIS train tracks, it was travesty that could never be let to happen, hypocrisy at the highest level.

Maybe true on the need for helicopters, but if not for the huts, the human waste would be strewn all over the alpine zone, under every little and large stone and krummholz bush. Human waste is much easier to manage below tree line if care is taken to use a trowel to dig a cat hole along with burning the tissue before backfilling.

When I first began my glacial geological field research in Pangnirtung Pass on Baffin Island in the 1970s, the area was becoming a destination for big wall climbers, and then backpackers, and the floor and sidewalls of the entire length of the spectacular 30-mile-long stretch of the southern end of the Pass became strewn with human turds capped with toilet paper and a couple little stones, like mini cairns. Simply disgusting sacrilege of a beautiful place.

The Canadian Government recognized the problem and established Auyuittuq National Park, which included Pangnirtung Pass where outhouses and small A-frame huts for emergency bivouacs were build every few miles. Human waste was disposed in heavy-duty plastic bags lining “honey buckets,” which were then carried out when frozen in winter by snow machine to a sewage lagoon outside the hamlet of Pangnirtung. I think that the alpine of northern New England is just as fragile as, if not more spectacular than, Pangnirtung Pass and needs the protection from human waste.