Big Nights Up North

You have to go way out in the boonies to find it, but Dartmouth's Moosilauke Ravine Lodge has got to be one of the best vacation buys in the country. Three dollars per person per night for the first 25 people, and less thereafter. This modest fee includes a bunk with a mattress. You should bring your own sleeping bag and towel. (Well, the lodge will, grudgingly, provide you with linens if you insist, at a hefty $4 extra.)

It's a relaxed, family-style operation, with an 11:00 p.m. curfew and lots of patient, hand-printed signs stuck around. "Please don't smoke and don't carve the woodwork," you are admonished, and "Wait until the toilet reservoir refills, or it won't flush."

The food, served boardinghouse style, is hearty and there is plenty of it. Charges run from a high of $4 for dinner to a low of $1 for a light "budget breakfast." Lunches are bagged and guests encouraged to hike off with them on the lovely Moosilauke trails.

For entertainment, there is the famous Doc Benton ghost story, told every Friday by one of the crew, while the rest of the crew, concealed in the kitchen, provide screams and loud crashes on cue. Drywitted Everett Blake, Orford dance caller, comes up every other Saturday with his square-dance records and stereo set for what Lodge Manager Dave Corey '78, rolling his eyes, calls a "big night." On "big nights" the place is packed with folks up from Hanover just for the dancing (which is free). Curfew is overlooked and the lodge timbers shake until midnight to the stomps and whirls of "Salty Dog Rag" and the Virginia Reel. (Otherwise, stereos, televisions, and other noise-makers are not allowed, in deference to the sylvan quiet of the mountain.)

The lodge is open to "the Dartmouth family" (which means anybody who can claim a sniffing acquaintance with somebody faintly connected with Dartmouth) from the first week in June until the first of September. During the first week of September, the main lodge and the four adjacent bunkhouses are at the mercy of successive waves of the Freshman Trip. After Freshman Week, large College groups of various kinds use the lodge for retreats and conferences. By October, the snow has come to the mountain and the lodge is shut down for the winter.

Built in 1937 under the direction of Woodcraft Instructor Ross McKinney, the rustic lodge is an imposing structure of massive spruce logs hewn from the mountainside. A skiway (now overgrown) was originally laid out beside the lodge, which for many years was open year-round. Inaccessibility and competition from other skiways, however, led to the lodge's folding in the fifties. From then until about five years ago, the place "just sat," according to Corey.

Then Al Merrill of the Office of Outdoor Affairs had what has turned out to be a bright idea. He convinced the Trustees to use money from the capital improvement fund to put the rundown lodge back on its feet for summer seasons. "Use of the lodge has really mushroomed in the last four years," says Corey. "It's only July and we have already had over 400 guests this season. We may even come out in the black. We have the largest lodge crew ever this year."

The largest-ever crew consists of three Dartmouth men - Supervisor Jack Noon '68, Lodge Manager Corey, and Head Cook Dave Focardi '81 - and three Dartmouth women, to whom Corey refers as "the girls" - Lisa Kaeser '78. Wendy Thurber '78, and Anne '81. (There was to have been another man in the position of assistant head cook, but he didn't show; his duties, though not his title, have been assigned to Thurber.) The crew is agreed that the biggest asset of the job is room and board and no place to spend the summer's wages. Despite the fact that run- ning the lodge involves a lot of work, from cleaning and plumbing maintenance to scything and mowing, there is still free time to be disposed of somehow. Running has become this year's official crew activity. A chart posted in the kitchen shows that the crew logs 20-25 miles a day and hopes to reach a total goal of 1,000 miles by the end of the summer. "Oh - and sometimes we go to the movies," adds Hallager brightly. "On a slow night, we work like crazy to clear up after dinner and then throw an old couch in the back of Jack's pickup truck and all go to the Orford drive-in."

In addition to paying guests, the lodge crew feeds and houses the trail crew, which maintains the mountain's trails for the College. The guest register lists people from Switzerland, families from Hanover, and several pages of Girl Scouts from Lyme. Biologists studying the metal content of the soil on the mountain use the lodge, and each year the University of Maryland sends a team of 20 from its school of recreation and resource management to study things like the effect on hiking trails of various kinds of boot sole.

So if you want to get away from it all, and if you can curb your desires to smoke and to carve your initials, come sample the College's mountain retreat. It's a nice place.