Living the Hut Life

I paid twenty-eight dollars for a plate of hash browns once. It was worth it. After five days of trekking across the original Haute Route and burning a couple thousand calories a day, we finally arrived at a hut in the early afternoon, before the kitchen had closed down to prepare for the evening dinner. I wanted rösti, the Swiss national comfort food gut-bomb, a pile of oil-cooked grated potatoes, cheese, and eggs, and every afternoon of our trip, we had arrived at a different hut just after the kitchen closed. So this time, I ordered it and gladly forked over the money, when in Rome or whatever.

And I sat at a table in the sun and ate the entire thing, enough for two people to split, and I watched avalanches rip down the thousand-meter-high north face of the Dent d’Hérens. I listened to them rumble down for a half-mile onto the glacier below, loud enough to drown out the giggles of the