Week long hut trip...help.

I got really lucky a couple weeks ago.  A friend called me up and asked if I wanted to join his group headed for a hut in BC for a week.  Sounds great.  Although, I have only done one overnight trip on skis, and that was in the spring, camping on dirt.  Known territory so to speak.  I have never been on a hut trip.  Packing for skiing, safety, and such seems easy enough.  I guess I am looking for a little advice on creature comforts.  What do you wish you had brought the last time you were on an extended hut trip?  The best part is, our stuff gets flown in...

Thanks in advance for the advice! 

Earplugs, especially if the hut has communal sleeping quarters. Maybe a sleep mask. A nighttime pee bottle comes in real handy. One pair of easy-on boots per group for tramping out to the outhouse. An LED headlamp for the evening. A complete change of clothing stashed in the car for when you come out. Alcohol-based hand cleaner - norovirus spreads like wildfire in the close confines of a hut. Clean hands and doorknobs every time you come back from the outhouse. Liar's dice. We all bring a thimble -- we break out an airline sized bottle of scotch when we reach the high point of the day.

A dozen of us spent the last week of January in a hut in the B.C. Interior. We made good use of Talkabout radios. Our big group typically split into several smaller groups and headed for different destinations each day. We called each other "every hour on the half hour" to check in. Between calls we turned off the radios to save batteries.

This was a really good way to keep track of each other. The hut had a custodian (our group was unguided) who checked in with the hut owner around sundown each day. They wanted everybody back at the hut by that time. (I think the big avalanche season a few years ago really put Canadian backcountry operators on edge about safety.) Our use of Talkabouts gave an extra level of confidence that everything was going okay, since the custodian had one too.

The operator provided us with a ham-equivalent radio that we could use to call for an immediate rescue, if needed. We carried it on tours but never turned it on.

Be prepared for colder weather than the Cascades. It's the Great White North, eh? 

yup, i second the earplugs and hand sanitizer!!

depending on what hut you're going to, you may or may not have problems with critters getting in to your food.  I've always packed my food in smallish rubbermaid bins (two bins could hold all my food for the week), then I didn't have to worry about mice getting into my food at night.

Its a good idea to bring some brightly colored flagging or tape to tie onto all your gear and the gear in your party when flying in/out.  The helipads are usually a little chaotic with duffles getting tossed all over the place...and its easier to make sure all your gear gets to the hut if your party's gear can be identified easily.

Might want to also make sure that your sleeping bag, and the toiletries/clothes you need for a day or two are in a small daypack that is in the helicopter you are flying in on...bad weather can roll in and stop the heli shuttling midway through a group's fly-in.  This happened to our group a few years ago at Fairy Meadows and one poor soul had to sleep without his sleeping bag the first night...the heli got in there the next day with the rest of our gear.

Bring at least one spare avy transceiver...it would suck to get up there and find that someone's beacon has pooped out.

Have fun!

Clem's right about the way sickness can spread in close quarters. I've gone in to a hut with one person in the group having a cold, and at the end, half the group had it. Fun. Then I learned about a product called Zicam - a zinc nasal spray (over the couter). It not only helps lessen the severity and longevity of a cold, it also seems to protect you from catching one when the germs are all around you but you don't have one yet (plausible, based on the input of an internist friend who specializes in infectious diseases who explained the mechanism by which Zicam works). If you use it, read the directions so you don't mace yourself. I bring a few little bottles on any hut venture now (some to give out to sick hutmates). It's not cheap and some people were apparently filing suit against the company claiming they'd lost their sense of smell, so consider yourself warned (I still use it, though, as to most of the people I've told about it).

The operator you're going with presumably will tell you your weight limit, and while some folks I've gone with come in way under the limit, others pile on the spare base layers for anti-reek and cotton clothes for the hut and books and cameras and martini fixings and fine chocolate and so forth until they've maxxed the limit - that's all of course up to what makes each person comfortable and happy.

I've seen spare binding parts come in particularly handy on at least one hut trip - you can definitely up the repair kit allowance a bit when flying in.

They or other hut outfits will also have some sort of gear list on their web site which is usually worth perusing to see if they have clever ideas. Some places have hut shoes there for you (and will probably tell you so near the gear list on their site), while at others you'll want to bring some unless you like wearing your boot liners around - something you can use to go outside and pee such as down booties can be handy.

Have fun!

What an excellent thread.
I'm also doing a hut trip (5 days) in the Wallowas. This will be guided. I've never packed for the back-country, so if anyone has a "packlist for dummies" list of recommendations, I'm all ears (or eyes, as it were).
We do have to pack our own lunches and breakfasts I believe, so recommendations there are welcome also. (It'll be over St. Patrick's day, so if anyone knows the alcohol content of bailey's vs. rumplemints for our hot chocolate, that's some useful info. )