50 Years of PATC Cabins
By Jess LaPolla
In January of 1975, Jim Haskell, Larry Davis, Steve Taylor, and Jim Brittingham decided to embark on a backpacking trip to Ramsey's Draft Wilderness. It was the dead of winter and had been sleeting and snowing just the day before. After hiking for a while, the group became cold, wet, and tired, and the prospect of tent camping in freezing temps was becoming less appealing (and less safe) by the minute.
“The sun goes down about 4 o'clock in the winter. It just gets cold when you're huddled up in a big tent, you know? But we had great visions of being manly men, I guess,” Jim Haskell recounted realizing that they didn’t really know what they were doing at the time.
Jim and his friends, along with a stray hiker they picked up along the way, eventually came across Sexton shelter, a rustic cabin that had been built in 1930 and was owned and operated by PATC. The group decided to break into the cabin to shelter there for the night. Jim noted that “It's the only time I've ever seen this on a cabin; the nuts that held the lock in place were on the outside of the building. We had a little rock there, and we just tapped on the square nuts, undid the lock, and got inside.” Together they started a fire and avoided getting frostbite that evening.
That was how Jim Haskell and his friends first learned about PATC’s cabins.
Visiting cabins became an annual tradition for the group, and they looked forward to having a guys trip every year. Their group grew to include Doug Campbell and Rick Dugger, who have been joining for the last 25-30 years. “One of the guys moved to Tennessee, one of them moved to North Carolina, and we all had jobs and families. But it was sort of our thing to always get back together. We weren’t going to miss a cabin trip.”
Jim recounted stories of visiting cabins every winter, sometimes hiking through waist deep snow to get there, sometimes finding themselves locked out of the park due to inclement weather. “Looking back to when we were younger, we'd go skiing and then hang out in the bar. And then at midnight we’d work our way over to our cabin. We'd start to hike a mile and a half down into the woods, over icy rocks. But we had fun. Nobody ever got hurt.”
As the guys got older, they started booking cabins they could drive up to, and cabins with more modern comforts. When asked about his favorite cabin, Jim said, “It's sort of hard to have a favorite cabin. It's like having a favorite kid, you know. They're all so different. They've all been wonderful, they really have.”
The group of friends spent their 50th cabin anniversary at Huntley Cabin. “It gets to mean more every year. The best part is just getting together and guys being guys, you know, and it's just a wonderful thing. We all value it more than we can put in words.”
