By David Hooke, Vershire, Vermont
[Editors note: To me, this story demonstrates how an excited group of young people can inspire others to join them in establishing an extensive trail and cabin system. The Dartmouth Outdoor Club (DOC) was an expression of the amazing conservation movement in the USA in the early 20th century. This outbreak of environmental fervor — led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and many others — inspired the development of the National Parks System of the U.S. and fostered greater environmental activism and consciousness in the U.S. population. This conservation movement also inspired a large-scale collegiate Outing Club movement that started at Dartmouth. In one generation the DOC developed a system of over 35 huts on trails leading from the Connecticut River in Hanover, N.H. into the heart of the White Mountains. I am grateful to David Hooke, author of Reaching That Peak: 75 Years of the Dartmouth Outing Club (1987), for kindly agreeing to write a brief summary of the origins and development of this collegiate cabin and trail system. — Sam Demas]
Dartmouth College, in Hanover New Hampshire, was a successful but quiet and remote outpost of North American higher education by the first decade of the 1900s. All-male from its founding in 1769, the college of 1909 was a lonely, even unhealthy place. Fall and spring dances were the only times that women were invited on campus; as result, winter was dismal, characterized buy “stuffy rooms, hot stoves, card games and general sluggishness resulting from lack of exercise.” Students and faculty alike were bored and looking for new possibilities.
