The huts at Big Sheep Creek give a new resident and a native of Wallowa County an opportunity to experience the landscape up close and personal.

Trekking through the mountains in the grip of wintry weather didn’t seem like the best idea at first.

I’m a flatlander, you see. Hailing from a place where the quickest route between any two places is a straight line, mountains, avalanches and predators are beyond my experience.

But every adventure must include an element of uncertainty and risk; and my friend Robyn Freatman – born and bred in Wallowa County – said it would be fun.

So we gathered our gear and drove east towards the mountains on Dec. 23. Our destination was the huts at Big Sheep Creek: an hour drive and a four-and-a-half mile hike from Enterprise. Passing through Joseph, we headed north along the line where the valley’s sea of pastoral yellow grass lapped against the slate-blue bulk of the Wallowa Mountains.

As we travelled, I began to see the mountains as more than just a scenic backdrop to the crush of days. Our success or failure demanded moving with the stoic forces of gravity, warmth and direction.

I remember reading a sign at a glitzy Colorado ski resort: the mountains will be as cold and lonely tonight as they were 100 years ago – don’t ski alone. Beyond the groomed trails, paved roads and the hubris of man, we were intentionally seeking an experience beyond the safe world we’ve inherited.

And as we drove with Mt. Howard and the Wallowa Lake moraine framed in the window, I wondered how this community could maintain this wildness and still allow desperate pilgrims to share in the eons-long conversation between earth and water and sky.

Crawling up the icy road to the Salt Creek Summit, we entered an area that burned about 15 years ago. Robyn’s family ran their cattle on this land then, and I tried to imagine her family loading fire-panicked cattle as I sat behind a desk worlds away in Memphis, Tenn.

The road ended and we parked the car. We secured our winter gear and backpacks, starting out carrying the snowshoes. I had never used them before, but I had almost five miles of hiking to figure it out.

Later, I attempted to explain snowshoeing to my mother. Being from the South, she had no idea what I was talking about for the first few minutes. Then a flash of realization: “Oh, they’re like walking on tennis rackets!”

Close enough, I thought.

The sky was gray and the air chilly as we started down the trail. I was concerned about being cold, but multiple layers and exertion kept us nice and warm.

After postholeing (attempting to walk through knee-deep snow) through the crusty surface several times, we decided to begin bobcatting (snowshoeing with ski poles for stability). I’d still occasionally punch through the snow even up to my hip, but I quickly found the rhythm of it.

After the first mile or so we’d be beyond most of the avalanche risk, said Roger Averbeck, the man who runs the huts and showed us how to get up there. We had to carry a shovel and a sensor around our waist in case we were buried in an avalanche.

Averbeck demonstrated the sensors in the comfort of his home – showing us how one sensor could locate the other by moving around and listening to the strength of its beeping.

As we walked, I’d glance up the mountain and think about what I would do if a wall of snow started heading our way. Perhaps my concerns were unfounded, but I really didn’t know.

We took our time on the trail, stopping occasionally for water or a sandwich. The trail was part way up a ridge, giving us a spectacular view of the countryside and the jagged spine of the Seven Devils Mountains in Idaho.

Even after so much time, the impact from the fire was apparent. Bare trunks swayed over the next generation of trees pushing skyward. A few trees were spared, but much of the forest was burned.

I told Robyn there was a bill moving through Congress that would allow the dead trees to be logged before they went to waste. Using the trees wouldn’t be a bad idea, but she wondered how they could be removed without crushing the baby trees and scarring the land with roads during extraction.

The conversation discussing both sides of the issue quickly dissolved into silence. There are so many arguments associated with these national forests lands: how they should be used or protected and what should or shouldn’t be allowed.

We pressed forward, each step crunching into the crusty snow. Going down hills was tricky; it would be easy to get my snowshoes tied up and go tumbling down the hill. Going up hill wasn’t easy either, especially with a 50-pound pack in thin air.

On the trail before us, we saw footprints from what we guessed was a bobcat. We saw some deer tracks, too, a few birds and a peculiar breed of spider that seemed lost skittering across the snowy landscape.

Trudging along a ridge we saw the huts across the ravine. They looked very small – and as the sun began to go down behind the mountains – very cold. We had to stop and rest as we descended the ravine and slowly climbed the other side, but we made it with a few hours of daylight remaining.

The huts are usually used for backcountry skiing, and are often booked years in advance. But the snow was too crusty to ski on and they were left open for us. We were the first to rent the huts this season, so there was plenty of firewood but the latrine was snowed in.

Built with an A-frame of logs, the interior skin of the huts were made from canvas. We decided to bunk in the cooking hut to keep us from having to build another fire. The wood stove was fairly large, but I doubted it would be able to heat the tent effectively. I hoped for the best, but wouldn’t have been surprised by a long, cold night.

Soon the fire was burning merrily and we began to think about dinner. For a hut in the middle of nowhere the kitchen was stocked with every utensil one could ever need.

From the ample supply of complimentary hot chocolate (13 family-sized cans), to the perfectly stacked wood, to the precisely marked trail, Averbeck’s attention to detail was reassuring.

We had a nice meal of spaghetti and by then the wood stove had heated the hut wonderfully. Between our multiple layers of clothing and the piping hot wood stove, being too hot rather than too cold was the more frequent complaint on the trip.

After dinner we looked over the guest book and quizzed each other from a set of wilderness survival trivia cards. With my experience in the Boy Scouts and Robin’s six summers as a wilderness guide, we got more right than we did wrong.

We got the fire in the sauna going and let it heat up a few hours. Once it was extremely hot in the small hut, we poured water over the rocks piled on the stove.

Clouds of steam quickly filled the hut, making us sweat profusely. It felt great, but the thick, humid air was almost too hot to breathe.

It was amazing how fast we cooled as we took a break in the cold night air. The mountains at night had an ominous presence and I wondered how long I could survive alone in it.

I thought about deer and elk finding a place to bed in the snowy hills. When I snowshoed to the latrine, I tried not to think about wolves and cougars and how vulnerable I’d be in the deep snow.

We passed the night in the huts, warm and content. The trip back to the car was fun but uneventful.

Probably my fears were unfounded. I’d heard no tales of avalanches or hikers being ripped by predators in the night. But to step into that wilder world -where safety isn’t guaranteed – sharpened my senses and make me appreciate all we have.