Hut Tripping

I went on my first hut trip last weekend. The plan was to ski in 5 miles on
Saturday to the first hut, 7 miles to the next hut on Sunday, then ski down
to Leadville on Monday. I brought my snowshoes just in case we got to some
difficult terrain or my feet started hurting.
The first day was hard, but mainly because I suck at skiing. I also
discovered that if you get your skins wet, lots of ice builds up, making
them very heavy. A nerve in my left foot got really pissed off about a mile
from the hut. So - the pissed of nerve strikes again - damn! The hut was awesome and toasty warm because a different group was already there when we arrived. Score! Dinner was good and I slept like a rock despite my proximity to strange snoring people.
The next day was a long one - we had 7 miles to go to the next hut and it
had been snowing steadily since Friday. We trekked our way through with
some great navigation from the people I was with. We had to go through some
waist deep snow drifts. Breaking trail in waist deep snow is very tiring
and takes a long time. We were about 2 miles from the second hut when we
lost the trail. We spent awhile looking for it, but with darkness falling
we needed a plan b. We had 3 options, still try to find the next hut in the
dark through more deep snow drifts, build a snow cave and camp out
overnight, or take the shortest path back to the car at the put in, which
was 7 miles. We option for the safest of the three - go back to the car.
Half the trail on the way back was already marked and broken from earlier,
and the other part was on the Colorado trail, which wasn't broken, but was very well marked.
We made it back to the car at around 11:00. Whew. That was the most
physically challenging thing I've ever had to do. 14 hours of skiing/snow
shoeing, half of that in the dark. The group I was with was great. No one
argued or freaked out and kept relatively positive attitudes through the
whole thing. Awesome. Scary. Tiring.