Lakes of the Clouds Hut

Climbing boots are nailed to the walls of the highest AMC hut on Mount Washington, a mountain that has killed over 150 hikers. Crew lore explains why.

There are boots nailed to the walls inside Lakes of the Clouds. Not decoration, not a joke. AMC crew lore says they belonged to climbers who died above the hut, and that the nails are there to keep the boots from walking away. Nobody on the current crew has ever taken them down.

The hut sits at 5,012 feet on the southern shoulder of Mount Washington, just below the summit cone, right at the edge of the alpine zone. It's the highest of the AMC's eight White Mountain huts and the largest, sleeping 90 guests in bunk rooms off a central dining hall. Every meal is cooked and carried up by a crew that hikes everything in and everything out. It's a remarkable operation, and it sits in one of the deadliest pieces of terrain on the East Coast.

More than 150 people have died in the Presidential Range, most of them on Mount Washington. Most of them died from weather rather than from falls. The summit holds the Northern Hemisphere record for a surface wind speed observed by a human, 231 miles per hour, clocked in April 1934. Blizzards can form in July. The temperature on the exposed ridge can drop 30 degrees in an hour. Hikers who get caught out in the open between Lakes of the Clouds and the summit, a mile-and-change across bare rock with no cover, are the ones who usually don't come back.

That death toll is why the ghost stories stick. The hut is effectively the last roof before a killing ground. Crew members talk about the souls of the mountain's dead circling back to the one warm building at the top, which is exactly what you want to believe at 5 a.m. when the wind is taking the roof off.

The story crew members keep telling involves a caretaker named George. He was up for pre-season, the hut still boarded up for winter, and he was inside alone when he felt someone approaching him from behind, the way you'd feel someone about to put their hands on your shoulders. He turned around. Nobody was there. Then he saw a face pressed against the glass from outside, distorted, tracking him as he moved. George ended up under the kitchen sink shaking and whimpering. He was evacuated down to the valley, eventually talked about what he'd seen, and never worked the hut again.

Dismiss it if you like. Pre-season hut inspection is a lonely job at altitude with thin oxygen and a lot of wind. But the crew repeats the story because it's theirs, and because it's a detail that makes the boots on the wall make sense.

The boots come up in almost every account of the place. Some are hiking boots from the 1960s. Some look newer. None of the guides are eager to say whose they were, though the tradition is that each pair belonged to someone who died above the hut, and that driving a nail through the sole keeps the wearer settled.

The hut itself is a working shelter, not a museum. In winter, when the main hut closes, a tiny emergency shelter in the basement stays open, called 'The Dungeon.' It's a stone room with a handful of bunks, a door, and nothing else. Hikers caught in weather can break in and wait it out. AMC staff say more than one party has arrived hypothermic and convinced that somebody else was already in there with them.

You can hike to Lakes of the Clouds on a clear day in running shoes. You can also die on the same trail in a July whiteout. The hut knows both versions of the mountain. The boots, the face at the window, the dungeon downstairs, they all belong to the second version.