The Rebuilders

Stitch had already cemented his reputation by the time I got pinned under the boulder. That summer, the kids working at Madison Spring Hut screen-printed a t-shirt with his likeness on it: bare barrel chest, red beard stained with some kind of tobacco product, like a Victorian-era mountain guide. A horse’s sleek body was photoshopped in place of his legs and underneath it “Half Man Half Horse” was emblazoned in pink block letters. Stitch never took to the shirt—deeming it a grotesque representation of his body—but in grasping for ways to describe him, I always come back to the centaur.

Each Monday that summer of 2010, Stitch hiked up to Madison, the oldest backcountry hut in the United States, perched on the northernmost outlook of New Hampshire’s Presidential Range. The Appalachian Mountain Club, which had owned and operated Madison and seven other backcountry huts like it for over a century, had raised more than a million dollars