The Big Burton Hut Restoration

In mid-June, I got a report that the roof of Burton hut was leaking. Some people had noticed some water stains inside the hut. No big deal I thought as I asked if anyone was planning to head up there anytime soon. I figured that a small can of rubber sealant and a careful inspection would take care of any leaks. Luckily, Joanna Gower was eager to lead a workhike in early July to try and patch the problem (members joining were Simon Tsianikas, Parham Zarei, Julia Jancelewicz, and Luzie Hugger). Unluckily, that workhike revealed that the roof was in a sorry state and wouldn’t hold up for very much longer. This roof was made of an outer shell of sheet metal, a layer of tongue and groove (boards that can slide into each other to hold shape), insulation, and then plywood. The sheet metal was full of holes. The tongue and groove was waterlogged and rotten. The roof had stood nobly for 50 years but was now on its last legs.

And so the email chains started. The first thought was to buy some plywood, sheet metal, and other materials, fly them up on a BC parks flight in a few weeks. We could then spend a few weeks building the roof in pleasant summer conditions. Turns out this flight wasn’t happening, so that idea was out. At this point, Jeff Mottershead had hopped in on the discussion. He was scheming a design for a new roof that would last another 50 years. Given the age of the hut, none of the original design documents have survived, so we had no measurements to reference. Cassandra Elphinstone volunteered to lead a small contingent of VOCers (Shu Yu Fan, Tom Curran, and Gabriel Csizmadia) up midweek to take some precise measurements for Jeff. They succeeded admirably in their task, putting together a detailed set of photos showing the damage along with measurements. Worryingly, they also found that the gothic arches supporting the roof had begun to delaminate. If we wanted the roof to last 50 years, we would have to address the arches.

Jeff set himself upon the monumental task of redesigning the hut and crafting new arches. At the same time, he would also address the flooring joists and ground beams. The floor joists had very wide spacing, causing the floor to sag. The ground beams had been sitting in the wet soil for 50 years. Why replace just the roof if the floor won’t be any good in 10 years? The floor needed attention too. While he did this, I would work on coordinating helicopters and people. We chose the end of August as our project date, expecting good weather and lots of availability from student VOCers not in school. Trips were posted, arches were bent into shape, helicopters were booked, and people were ready. Things looked primed to go. Alas, when organizing a complex trip like this, something always goes wrong. That something was getting permission from BC Parks. Since the hut was originally constructed in 1969, it had existed before the current BC Parks permitting process and an agreement had never been formalized despite efforts in 2019. The scale of the project brought this issue to attention, and BC Parks told us that we could not proceed until we received a Parks Use Permit (PUP). Problem: the median PUP takes 180 days to be reviewed and we had already spent tens of thousands of dollars and committed hundreds of man-hours. Crisis mode.

Luckily, the night we were informed of the PUP requirement was also the night of Jacob Grossbard’s birthday dinner. This dinner had in attendance a collection of five past VOC presidents. We had a crisis meeting over some slices of cake and decided the best way forward was to talk to BC Parks about the urgency of the situation so that we could still move on the construction and not let the hut fall into disrepair while waiting for the PUP. Thankfully, once BC Parks got a better idea of the project, they were very helpful and willing to work with us provided we met insurance and other requirements. Their responses were quite fast, but projects like this tend to be timed very precisely. You can’t expect people to take time off work if you can’t tell them for sure if they’re going or not, and helicopters need to be canceled well in advance. So, by the time authorization came, too many pieces of the puzzle had moved. We would have to push back our start time. We would build from Sept. 23rd to Oct. 8th. It would be cold, the weather would be bad, and people have classes to attend. It would be a harder construction than expected, but we were confident we could do it.

And so September came around. Preparations rolled into high gear. The plan was for a small demo crew to go up on the 23rd to rip the hut apart for the heli that would come on the 24th. Jeff, Jacob G., John Sherk and I would stay up there until the project was done. Others would rotate in/out based on their availability. Ryan Macdonald, Duncan MacIntyre, and Jacob were to head up as the demo crew, with Ryan and Duncan sticking around until the end of the weekend too. But Jacob was sick when Monday came around, and wisely opted to stay home so as not to get the whole crew sick. So, Ryan and Duncan headed up together with a determination to demolish. Demolish they did. Together, they managed to take off a solid half of the hut roofing. Ryan has written up an excellent account of his time here: https://www.ubc-voc.com/2024/09/28/last-night-at-burton-gatorade-is-a-spice. Their destruction would set us up for construction.

Back in the real world on Monday night, Jeff and John has started staging materials for the helicopter the next day. This involved unloading a flat-bed truck in sequence along the rubble creek staging area using a Jeff-constructed crane apparatus. I arrived at around midnight and helped unload until around 2 am. At this point, Jeff would drive back to town and reload the truck for the next round of staging. This sort of work schedule would be a small taste of what was to come.

Jeff had been concerned about Rubble Creek bandits coming to steal our wood, so John and I watched the wood in shifts until morning. After all, if they were willing to steal Jeff’s moldy trail runners, it makes sense that they might want to steal $20,000 in lumber and metal. Alas, morning came around and we had no bandit encounters. The helicopter crew rolled up with a fuel truck. Jeff, Alex Rigby, and Dave Mackenzie rolled up with the flatbed and the second load of wood. Apparently, Jeff had gotten a whole 2 hours of sleep that night. After some minor faff about not having enough slings for all our loads, the helicopter started flying. There was about 14,000 lbs of material, so we were in for 14 flights. With a round trip time of about 15 minutes, and some faff re-attaching slings by the crew up top, this took a while. When the crew up top wasn’t working with the heli, they were vigorously working on tearing down the rest of the roof. After all, helicopters are expensive, so we might as well load up the return trips with loads of waste.

During all the helicopter flights, lots of things were happening simultaneously. First, Jeff’s coworker Will Beattie had arrived at the hut to help for a few days. I hadn’t mentioned his arrival to the guys, so they understandably got quite a scare when he came out of nowhere. Second, the crew was getting to the mouse poop soup and the styrofoam insulation. It was getting everywhere. They asked us to pick up a vacuum over the InReach. Down on the ground, we were somewhat puzzled about whether we needed a vacuum and considered not getting one. Boy, am I glad we did. On close to the last load, we tossed our packs and the vacuum into the sling. We figured we could hike faster with minimal gear. Unfortunately, Quintus Zhou and Aaron Lee showed up just after this flight. It would be the last sling load, so they would have to carry up all their gear. We told them to start hiking and we’d catch up to them when the helicopter finished.

Soon the helicopter finished. One small problem – it started raining. John and I had left our warm layers in our bags. Jeff had no rain layers and no warm layers. The higher we got up the switchbacks, the rainier it became. By the time we had gotten to the boathouse, it was a downpour. Quintus and Aaron had been waiting a while and were found in one of the warming shelters. With little time before sundown, we scrambled into our canoes and set of across the lake. Despite paddling vigorously, I was freezing the whole time. I’m sure the others were not much warmer. When we finally, reached the other side of the lake, it was already well past dark. This made finding the inlet to Sphinx bay somewhat challenging. We paddled the wrong way up the coast for about 10 minutes until we realized we had gone too far and turned around. After paddling the other way for a while and cursing our the mistake, we finally found the inlet and landed out canoes.

The hut was in sight, with the missing wall covered in a large tarp. We clambered in, cold and wet. The demo crew had thought of our plight and had started cooking up a recipe from our food menu. Emma Ghelfi had designed a rotation of delicious meals that we could prepare with supplies we had helicoptered in. Tonight, and on so many other nights, these meals would become an all-so-needed respite from the work and weather. The hut smelled of food. We gulped down our dinners quickly, needing some food to warm up. Being plenty tired, we all went to bed pretty much right after. It was many degrees warmer inside than outside, and significantly drier. The guys had set up my tent already, but I couldn’t be convinced to go back out there. After dinner, Jeff, Aaron, and I made our beds in the hut assuming we would have a pleasant sleep.

As it turned out, sleeping in the hut was not very restful. At around 3 am, the winds picked up and ripped the tarps off. We grabbed the impact driver and some cord and set about fixing the tarps. Thankfully, the rain had somewhat let off for a moment. It took a bit over half an hour to fix the tarps and a bit more than that to go back to sleep. Around the same time, John had woken up for a washroom break and discovered my tent upside down in a bush. He too spent some time re-rigging the tent so it wouldn’t fly away.

We woke up bright and early the next day. I can’t speak for the others, but I felt like I had gotten zero sleep. We set about eating our one breakfast option: oats served from a 10 kg pail. Granted, we had a variety of various things to put in it: cinnamon, sugar, apples, etc.. As we ate, we discussed our tasks for the day. These would be finishing the demo by removing the remaining tongue and groove and any insulation. Soon, talk became action. We suited up in our rain gear and got up on the second floor. The rain was heavy and it was near zero. Within 20 minutes of starting, I heard Ryan say “I think my rain gear has completely wetted out”. “Same here, same here” I thought. We ripped boards, grinded stubborn nails, and scooped insulation. The latter was perhaps the most unpleasant of the tasks. The insulation was mixed with mouse poop in a 50/50 ratio. The rain was turning this mix into a heavy soup that we were all standing in. The vapour barrier laid on the floor would create bubbles of soup that would threaten to burst onto everything downstairs if we didn’t drain them. It was quite a grim task. Our main tools for this fight were the vacuum and the hut shovel. As the vacuumers vacuumed, they found mice, both alive and dead in the soup. It was quite a relief when the last of the insulation was gone. Of course, we would find bits and pieces of it all over the hut, our stuff, and the containers of food over the next few days.

Sometime well after noon, John set up his orange mec tarp to create a food and cooking area. Over the next few weeks this tarp would be our only reprieve from work. The unfortunate thing about the setup was that it was very low. To be under the tarp meant being hunched over. The lack of chairs also meant that we would sit on boxes, again, hunched over. And when we worked, the angles were often awkward, so most of the time we would be hunched over. This meant that our backs just hurt constantly. But that’s an aside. That lunch, we would have another of Emma’s recipes, and we would finally break into our stash of gatorade powder. I started this off by making gatorade tea – just gatorade and hot water. This is actually pretty good, I’d recommend it. We also started on our supply of tuna cans. These came in one size – 1.25 kg (drained weight). Little did we know, these two things would soon be combined…

As the old tongue and groove came off, we started putting the new stuff on. With tongue and groove, the next piece’s “groove” has to slide into the old piece’s “tongue”. In theory, they should slide together perfectly. In practice, not so much. Sometimes quite a bit of force was needed. Some tricks we developed included standing on it, sometimes even sitting on it, and then hammering it in with smaller pieces of tongue and groove. After enough tongue and groove was on, we started putting on the first layer of roofnado. Think thick sheets of rubbery material with glue on the bottom. You can put screws through these sheets and water won’t seep through. We were actually quite productive this day and managed to get most of one side tongue and grooved and roofnadoed, with a start on the other side too. Feeling good, we retired for dinner and bed around sundown. This timing would prove atypical.

The next day, I woke up to Jeff loudly exclaiming “Good morning everybody!”. I would reply “Good morning Jeff!”. For the next two weeks, this would become my wakeup routine. I got on my soaking wet rain layers, wet boots, and wet gloves and took a survey of the weather. A slight improvement, except it was now snowing. Throughout the day, we would watch the snow line slowly creep down towards us.

An aside I should mention is that on arrival, out of habit, I had hung my bag of personal snacks in the hut. This bag contained my toothbrush. This bag was not waterproof. This bag was directly below a stream of poop soup water. I did not dare use my toothbrush, and so my oral hygiene was deteriorating despite finger brushing. After a breakfast of oats, I gave in and asked for a new toothbrush over InReach. The Friday crew would be coming up tomorrow with a much-needed ladder and hopefully a much-needed toothbrush.

This day, a lot of the work was the same. We finished the tongue and groove on the other side and roofnadoed as much as we could. Then, we got a start on raising the next support arches. These were hefty, 40 lb chunks of wood with a weird balance point. Inside, we measured out spacing for footlong structural screws on the old arches. We would raise the beam, hold it up, align it with the old beam, and then hold it there as we made small adjustments. Eventually, Jeff was satisfied and we would drive the structural screws in. These are very satisfying to drive – pure impact driver action. This day, we also learned the importance of steel-toed boots. One of these arches got dropped on Jeff’s toe from a height of about a foot. Toe-crushing in normal boots, no biggie with steel toes.

Sometime after lunch, Will left, having to get back to the city. Or perhaps he left after seeing my latest Gatorade creation: tuna seasoned with Gatorade. Not bad, just don’t add water, then it’s quite bad. He kindly took one of the canoes over so there would be less shuttling to do for the Friday group. After Will left, we managed to get a few more arches up before dinner and then called it a night.

Friday was an exciting day. We would get a whole new crew of people, our much-needed ladder, and a much-needed toothbrush. We would be at our strongest yet. Feeling like we would want to get lots of work done today, I wanted to make the most effective fuel possible for breakfast. This fuel should contain protein, carbs, and electrolytes – tuna, oats, and Gatorade. A combination that would be dubbed “tunagato-oatarade” or “tuna-oatarade” for short. It looked like a pink slop. It tasted bad and it was hard to finish the large bowl I had made. In truth, I don’t remember what day I discovered tuna-oatarade, but the essential experience is the same regardless of the day.

After some deliberations, Aaron and Ryan decided that they would have to go back to town today. We would miss them. At the same time, canoes had to get across the lake, and there were a bunch contractor bags of insulation building up. I strapped a hideously heavy and grossly unbalanced bag of insulation to Aaron’s bag and handed Ryan some chunks of steel. They stuck around for a few hours to help the central roof beam go up, and then set off on their way.

After the central beam was in, we could start adding roof arches on the other side. The weather was also sunny for the first time, making work pleasant. Our hands were still swollen and our boots soaked, but the feeling of the sun on your skin tends to make you forget all that. As arches went up, we waited for the weekend rotation to come up (Melissa Chen, Nolwenn Deschamps, Connor Jakes, Katie Sattler, and Jacob Grossbard who would be staying until the end of the project). We were wondering how they would fare getting the ladder up the switchbacks. But, turns out that Melissa had an excellent system that involved balancing it on her pack.

Sometime around this time, we started realizing the hut was as Jeff likes to say “higgledy-piggledy”. Ie. the dimensions were skewed, so the arches would not be perfectly aligned. This would be a problem for a later day, as for now, we needed to get enough arches on to jack up the hut and address the flooring.

The group arrived in the late afternoon and helped us put up arches before dinner. We then got a briefing of the plan for the next day. We would finish raising arches, allowing the structure to be strong enough to be jacked. We could then jack up each side, and slide a new ground beam under the hut. This ground beam could be fixed in place, and the hut lowered onto it. We would repeat this for both sides. Then, we can raise the hut again, and now that the ground beams aren’t 50% rot, we could set the hut down on supports, making it safe to go under the hut.

The next day, we did just that after waking up to Jeff’s morning greeting. The new beam was shockingly heavy. Even with all hands on, it was still no easy feat to lift it. This got done sometime around 3 pm.

At this point, I’ll take an aside. On a big project like this, not everyone can work on the main job all at once. There are lots of non-construction, but important tasks around the camp, like cooking, cleanup, etc… Without these tasks work would eventually grind to a halt. Chief among the tasks is cooking. I did not do much cooking this week, but I am very grateful to those who did (shoutout Duncan, Quintus and others who stepped up). Today, I got the solar charging setup going with Connor’s help. This would save us from running the generator more than we needed to. We disinfected the entire hut with bleach. It was now somewhat safer to touch. I also arranged bags of trash and picked through our pile of old tongue and groove. During this task, I spotted a furry friend: a stoat. This stoat would become somewhat of a daily fixture for me. I was pleased to learn that stoats kill vast amounts of mice. A few days ago, I had built a temporary bridge across a creek. This creek needed to be crossed to reach our tents every night and used to be a death-defying rock hop. Now it was a death-defying limbo across wobbly bits of tongue and groove. Connor made a significant improvement to the bridge setup, making it non-death-defying. Lots of small tasks like this would happen every day at camp.

This day however, our fates would irreparably change. Tomorrow’s plan involved having everyone hammering in roof joists – a labour intensive task that could take advantage of our increased numbers. What did that mean for us today? We would have to finish our work under the hut and lower the hut before the start of the next day’s shift. There was a lot of work to do. First, there were about three lengths of tongue and groove to fit. Second, we needed to shim gaps between the tongue and groove and the new ground beam. Third, we would install new floor joists. This would effectively double up the support the floor would receive. We then secure the joists to the rest of the hut structure. Finally, we lower the hut. Quite a handful.

Turns out installing tongue and groove from the bottom down is harder than from the top up. You have to fight gravity to keep the board in place. Katie and I created a great system where we would lie on our backs and hold the board in place with our legs. This system worked well, and it only took a few hours to get all the remaining T&G in. As this happened, Jacob and others would start shimming.

The tongue and groove effort got finished just as the sun started setting. We couldn’t resist and all went to watch the sunset. After a 10 minute sunset break, it would be all hands on floor joists. There would be a team under the hut positioning joists, a team outside the hut handing joists, and a person inside the hut screwing them in from above. Having no regard for the health of my back, I of course volunteered to stay under the hut. My back did not like this, but we got all the joists positioned.

After a late dinner (10 pm?). We decided that there was no use in all of us being dead tired tomorrow. Myself, John, Jeff, and Jacob would stay on for the night shift, and others would get up early the next day. We would finish securing the joists to the rest of the hut with a combination of nails through Simpson Strong Ties, and big screws. Jeff’s speed at hammering really shone here. As we did the other tasks, he hammered most of the strong ties in without a break. This is not an easy task in a confined space with awkward angles.

We actually managed to finish all the work sometime past midnight. I guess we still had a lot of energy at that point. Then, came the lowering. Lowering was a tedious process of jacking, removing supports, moving to the other side and repeating. It was also only a two person job. I contemplated going to bed, but I’m glad I didn’t. Just as we were doing the final lower, I heard a nasty crunch under the hut and yelled out for the others to stop! Turns out the ground under the hut was no longer level and some big rocks were threatening to destroy the joists. I’m glad they didn’t. We didn’t take extras of most of the materials. Not wanting to rejack the hut, we carefully worked from the outside, pushing dirt and rocks around with shovels and the rock bar. After half an hour of toil, we felt it was sufficiently level to continue. Thankfully, we were right. The hut was lowered, and the below-hut work was done. We were ready to keep working on the roof tomorrow (it was 2 am, so actually today).

The next shift can only be described as toil. The roof arches would need to be joined together with joists. 10 joists between each pair of arches, going from the ground up. These joists would attach to the arches with more of the dreaded Simpson Strong Ties. These took something like 16 nails per side. Nominally these nails would 10d, but we had run out. However, we had a big box of 16d. These were wider and longer. They would bend the metal of the tie as they went in, ringing like pitons. They would also bend themselves as they went in due to the awkward angles (upside down, right next to the joist, etc..). For every set of nails we would hammer in, we would invariably spend 15 or more minutes battling with the ones we bent. The pry bar would become a good friend to us. Hammering continued throughout the whole day today. After dinner, we couldn’t just stop. The crew would be leaving tomorrow, so we figured may as well get a bit more done that night. We hammered until midnight or so. At that point, exhaustion, soreness, and the generally swollen state of our hands kicked in, leading us to quit for the night. We had worked admirably, getting the majority of the roof joists in place.

The next morning, the weekend crew got ready for departure. Of course, you can’t send guests away without presents to take home. I had a number of comically heavy and unbalanced contractor bags. For those who didn’t fancy bulky, I could always give them heavy pieces of steel. We managed to ratchet strap one of the contractor bags to Melissa in a somewhat balanced way (provided she walk hunched over). I tried to do the same for Katie, but no matter how hard we tried, the center of gravity would never quite work out. Instead, she and the others got their choice of steel blocks. Duncan would also be leaving today. He would write a trip report about his experience which you can read here: https://www.ubc-voc.com/2024/10/08/fixing-rolands-hut. It would now be myself, John, Jacob, and Jeff until next weekend.

After the group left, the joists were finished up by about 1 pm. We had been closely following the weather, and there would be a storm moving in the next day. Problem: the next step involved putting in insulation. Once the insulation is in, you don’t really want it to get wet. Ie. we would have to finish enough of the roof to cover it before the storm. This is no trivial task, especially with four people. We would need to insulate, create horizontal and vertical framing over the roof, apply two layers of plywood, and then apply a layer of roofnado to seal everything in. We could already tell, it would be a long day. We didn’t realize yet just how long…

Insulation went quickly. It took just over an hour. Framing went slower. By the time the sun set at 7 pm, we had hardly finished all the vertical rows, let alone the horizontals. When wood is springy, it is a huge pain to get a nail through it. When you stretch wood over a curved hut, it has to be springy. Hence all the framing was springy. Nails kept popping out. It was a pain.

Sometime after sunset, most of our headlamps started dying. Turns out headlamp batteries don’t last forever. This led to the invention of the “moon tower” (look these up, it’s how small towns in the U.S. used to be lit at night). Our moon tower used a Milwaukee light ski strapped to a long piece of board.

Sometime near 2 am, the framing was done. We could now attach plywood. We would hammer in the first layer onto the framing we had just laid. Our nails would need to land along the studs where the framing crossed each other. The problem here is that we didn’t mark the expected locations on the plywood. So, there was a lot of guesswork involved. Sometimes 2-3 nails per stud would be needed until we got a solid one. Jacob filmed a short timelapse at 120x speed. I’ll let that speak for itself.

The second layer of plywood would be screwed in. This was a small mercy. It is much easier to drive in screws than nails. Jeff would apply PL premium to a sheet and then we would screw it in. This was once again complicated by a complete lack of marking. As we worked, slowly it became lighter and lighter outside, until we no longer needed the moon tower.

At 7:30 am, the last piece of plywood was up. We were dead tired. Jeff offered us a choice: roofnado now, or tarp things and do it later. You can’t leave a job undone, so we chose to roofnado. Would it feel right to sleep on a job with only one step left?

We worked fast to get the roofnado on. Thankfully, it’s a straightforward process. Hold it onto the plywood. Tack it. Take the backing off. Repeat. As the last piece came on, we felt drops of rain. The rain was almost a relief. Imagine if we had worked this hard to beat the rain and it hadn’t even rained. Around 8:30 am our job was done. We were utterly spent. We had all worked for at least 24 hours. Jacob thinks 25. Jeff might have worked 26 since he likes to get up earlier. With the last of our strength, we headed to the food tent to eat some snacks. Afterward, we headed to our tents to sleep out the rain.

After a much-needed sleep, we lazily rolled out of bed sometime in the late afternoon. You can’t sleep forever, eventually, you’ll get hungry. We headed to food tent to make breakfast (lunch? dinner? I’m not sure which is the right term). Jeff was missing. Eventually, we surmised that he had canoed to the other side of the lake to pick up supplies. A few days ago we had realized that we were missing a number of structural screws. Also, we were running low on white gas and would need a bunch to run the heaters and dry out the hut. Luckily, Adam Steele (our in-town InReach contact) found Joseph Chiao willing to help. Joe had school to do though, so he would have to head up late. Adam gave him a ride to the trailhead, and at around 11 pm the previous day he hit the trail with about 16L of white gas, the screws, and a gallon of bleach. As a little gift to us, he even included an 8 pack of beers, brownies, and some hand warmers! As we were working a night shift, Joe was too. On the way up, it seems that some of the white gas cans ruptured and started leaking. Joe applied some tape and stashed it for us to pick up. Eventually, Jeff returned with Joe’s stash. We would chat for a bit, pick up some garbage, and then head back to sleep. Today would be a zero-day for all but Jeff.

The next day we got up, ready to work. After all, we had one more side of the hut to do. It was the same story with the weather though. A storm would be coming in the next day, and we would need to get everything done before then. This time we had a few things going for us. First, the joists were already done. Second, we would mark the plywood this time. Third, we had done it once before and would be faster. I’ll save myself the trouble of writing about the same thing twice, but it did go much better this time. We finished at about 3 am, which feels much better than finishing at 8:30 am. Actually, I felt lucky to be working late that night. It was a very clear night, and the stars were out in spectacular form. Jacob made another excellent timelapse of the process that you can watch below.

As the clear skies may have hinted, the weather turned out pretty good that morning. No sign of a hideous storm. Upon checking the InReach forecast, we saw that the storm had actually shifted one day into the future. Today would be a good day to work outside, and we couldn’t waste it. Reinforcements were due to arrive tomorrow (Friday) and we wanted to get as much done as possible before they arrived. Today would be the flashing. Flashing is a layer of metal that goes on the front and back of the hut. It prevents moisture from getting on the sides of the hut, but also allows air to flow through, allowing for the insulation to breathe. But first, breakfast. Today, Jacob would make pancakes. I would emulate him unsuccessfully on account of having none of the ingredients, and instead, I ended up with a crumble and a Gatorade simple syrup to go on top.

The flashing was a welcome relief from hammering. There was a lot of cutting and holding things in place. Generally precision work rather than brute force. Still, after the flashing was cut it took quite a while to get it on the hut. There are two layers of it, it goes on in a certain order, and it should be well aligned. Finally, the air gap between the layers would have to be mouse proofed. I guess we could have foregone this step, but I doubt mouse poop soup is quite as good an insulator as pure fiberglass. To do this, we would simply stuff wire mesh into the gap. We worked into the night to finish, but nowhere near as late as the other days.

Friday was due to be crappy weather for most of the day. Thankfully, we still had an interior to finish. We had torn off a lot of the paneling and insulation during the demo due to it being covered in mouse poop. We had also disassembled a bunch of the furniture. Our thought process was that this would be easy work that would take a few hours, and by the time we finish, the weekend crew would arrive.

We started by insulating. We only had a bale of Roxul that to cover all the gaps, so we had to be efficient. The bale had been manually hauled up by Anya Boardman in the days before, so it was extra valuable. This insulating task made the air itchy. It was a welcome break to go out in the rain and look for the missing panels. We had cut some useful panels into shims already, so the search was only partially fruitful. No matter, we had the skill saw and lots of extra paneling. We didn’t quite have enough Roxul for the whole hut, so we had to get creative and re-use the old insulation in some places. After insulating, we made a very expensive vapor barrier out of scrap Roofnado. Unfortunately, this too was not enough for the whole hut. We re-used the old vapor barrier, which combined with an excess of tuck tape worked pretty well.

As the day dragged on, and we had no updates from the “support crew” as Jeff called them (I called them the “relief crew”) we started to realize that they wouldn’t make it up that day. This made my morale drop a touch. Thankfully, I received a promotion at work to the ever-important “gap manager”. My new job would be to fill air gaps in the loft, walls, and anywhere in the hut. This kept me occupied for a while (read until 11 pm). By then, our respective tasks were done to a respectable level given our limited resources. It was time to assemble the hut furniture. To our sleep-deprived minds, this was a monumental challenge. The furniture was built in situ, so it was very long and had to be assembled in the correct order. It didn’t help that most of the legs were held in with a single bent nails and would threaten to break with the smallest movement. Sometime past midnight, we started on the cooking area. We were wholly unsuccessful, spending more time debating which piece went on top and which went on the bottom. After not having made progress in 1 hour on a 30 minute task, we called it a night.

The next morning, as usual, I awoke to Jeff’s “Good morning everybody!”. Jeff must have noticed the lack of enthusiasm in my “good morning”. I was forced to repeat it again with more cheer. But this time the cheer was real since Jeff revealed that he could see the canoes with the weekend crew coming in. I got out of my tent just in time to greet Tom Curran, Ross Campbell, Haley Foladare, Daniel Schmidov,  Jacob Ticehurst-Wong, and Stefanija Rekasius. Seeing this fresh crew did indeed make me feel relieved. The odds of finishing by Monday had increased substantially. We got together for breakfast to discuss the plan for the weekend. I learned that back in the real world they had heard about tuna-oatarade and assumed we were starving (rather than consuming optimal nutrition). Everyone on the weekend crew had brought their own food.

The main task would be applying the sheet metal roofing and finishing the flashing. After breakfast, we set to doing just that. We had a shortage of harnesses, so I gave mine up to Tom. He was fresh and would be more useful up high than me. There was some panic on the first sheet when we realized that our screws were too short to penetrate from the ridges of the sheet metal into the plywood. Jeff had pre-drilled all the sheet metal along the ridges. However, some brainstorming concluded that we could just go through the flat part of the sheet metal instead. Jeff would later come back to fill these holes in an epic “day trip”: https://www.ubc-voc.com/2024/10/20/red-heather-day-trip.

For now, the roofing wouldn’t be my domain. Instead, I planned to finish the interior. We still had a number of tasks left. These included shining up the aluminum cooking surface, finding all the trim and cutting the pieces we couldn’t find, and of course filling mouse sized gaps by any means necessary. Throughout the course of the day, I set about these tasks. People would come in and help out when they needed a break outside. Daniel and Jacob TW helped with the table, and later in the evening, Haley would help with the door’s weather stripping. But, mostly I took on the role of gap manager. My job was eliminating all mouse-sized gaps. If you see strangely shaped blocks of wood sticking out of strange places in the hut, that’s probably my work. I can’t say my gap management looks all too great, but you work with what you have.

There’s only so much work to do in the hut, so come night-time, I was sufficiently satisfied and retired from both of my roles: interior manager and gap manager. I then joined Daniel and Ross on the ground. The crew had put a bunch of sheets up already. I would alternate between three roles. First, helping Ross carry over sheets and get them up to the up high team. Second, helping Daniel push the sheets into place so they could be screwed in. My back was in constant distress by this point, so occasionally Daniel would give me a much welcomed back massage while we held the sheets in place. Finally, Daniel and I would drive some of the lower screws. While all this was happening, Stefanija and Jeff were working on the flashing for the rear of the hut. Parallel processing. It need not be said that finishing the sheet metal took until 2 am.

Unfortunately, Sunday came and the new crew would have to leave. With great faff, we figured out the optimal canoe strategy that would allow people to keep working as long as possible. Stefanija, enjoying the immense suffering on the project, volunteered to stay one more day. After spending some time working on the rodent-proofing the hut and finishing the flashing, it was time for the crew to leave. After doing a quick photoshoot with all our Milwaukee tools, I gave everyone parting gifts. Much to their chagrin, the gifts were either extremely bulky or extremely heavy. Stefanija, being a rower, would go with them and then shuttle canoes across so we would have enough boats to leave on Monday.

The rest of the day was spent finishing the rodent proofing. Generally, this consisted of putting mesh in places rodents like to go. It was quite satisfying when at the end of the rodent proofing, our friend the stoat tried to gain entry into the hut. It tried very hard for about 10 minutes and failed. It was even more satisfying to later see a mouse try the same and fail.

As the day became late, construction started slowly shifting to cleanup. I saw that there was a lot of usable construction material left over. It would be a shame to let it go to waste, so I decided to address something that had been bothering me both of the two previous weeks. To get to the outhouse in the rain, you have to walk through a three-meter-long puddle that was several inches deep. So, I built a boardwalk over it with Stefanija’s help. This recycled quite a bit of material.

As day became night, the cleanup generally moved radially from the hut. We would walk out, retrieve junk, cut it up, and pile it neatly behind the hut. The radius from which we would retrieve junk would generally shrink over time. This was quite satisfying. This progressed for quite a while until Jeff and Stefanija finished the last of the flashing and the roof cap. Anticipation started building. The end was palpably close.

Around 2:30 am, the moment came. Everything was done, everything was cleaned up. There was just one finishing touch left: the tall, shiny marker at the top of the hut. Jeff did the honors. We popped a bottle of champagne. Life felt good. We felt accomplished. That night Jacob, John, and I would stay in the hut. We had sent our tents away to make more room to carry down tools the next day. To celebrate more, we cracked some of the beers Joe had carried up for us. I got about 1/4 of a can down before I fell asleep mid-conversation.

The next morning I woke up with a substantial headache. But I couldn’t complain too much. The hut was done. We took a moment to revel in our creation.

A moment is all we could take though. Work never ends, and we still had hundreds of pounds of tools to carry down. We loaded up ridiculously heavy packs, trying to fit in as much as we could. You know your pack is bad when you need help standing up with it on. Jeff had probably the most ridiculous pack I’ve seen. He had all his overnight gear, all the leftover food cans, a generator, a jerry can of gas, flippers, and assorted tools. I couldn’t pick his pack up. After a fairly uneventful canoe across the lake, realizing the length of the trail ahead of us, and the weight of our packs, we tried to eat as much food as possible to save weight. Of course, this made little impact.

About five minutes in, I realized just how much of a suffer-fest this was going to be. I’m sure the others felt the same. We gritted our teeth and walked. Eventually, we made it to the cars. We were relieved for two reasons. The first being that we could take off our packs. The second was that nobody had smashed our car windows. After a back-stretching session and a gear distribution, we were done. Done. We drove to A&W and ate many many burgers. When I got home, I fell asleep almost as soon as I touched my bed. Working towards the goal of finishing the hut felt good, but being done and in my own bed felt even better.

In closing, I’d like to make a few remarks.

1. This was a huge project. Many many VOCers contributed in many many ways, big and small, all important. Thank you. It wouldn’t have been possible to do this without the support of so many of you.

 
2. We received monetary contributions from the ACC Whistler Section, the FMCBC, the AMS, and a number of individuals. These too were essential to making the project possible. Thank you.

 
3. Next year, we will have to redo the walls at Brian Waddington Hut (Phelix). This should be the last of the major hut projects for a while. Three hard years in exchange for many easier ones. I encourage the reader to keep the upcoming project in the back of their mind and come to help out when the time comes. The reward is a lifetime of memories.