The next day we had a continental breakfast provided by the motel. Except for the lousy coffee, this had a pretty good selection as motel continental breakfasts go, including cook-your-own waffles and hard boiled eggs. We chose to eat here each morning rather than go out. Then we drove north about 15 miles for a day of area skiing at Ski Cooper, the traditional acclimatization activity the day before heading up to the hut.

Ski Cooper is an old, small, family-oriented area without any high speed lifts, but still bigger than most areas in New Hampshire. It is a pleasant, relaxed place where you we could park 5 minutes from the lodge, and the lift tickets are only $39 compared to around $90 at the big places like Cooper Mountain. A snowfall the night before let us make fresh tracks. Even late in the day, it wasn't skied out. Their most "expert" trails were barely even "advanced", but this was OK by me for an acclimatization day. Nobody got hurt, and some of us even got tired.

On the way back from Ski Cooper we drove right by the 10th Mountain Hut trailhead at Crane Park. While at Cooper, Chris talked to a person who knew about our hut, and told us that we could park much further up the forest service road by the trailhead, instead of the official 10th Mountain parking lot by the highway. So we drove up that road to check it out, and found a large plowed pullout that was empty but had room for at least 5 or 6 cars. The snow banks were over 6' high everywhere. I calculated that starting from here would save us nearly a mile of skiing and about 250' of vertical. There was a lot of debate about whether parking here was allowed, but it was a public road and there was no sign unless it was buried under the snow banks.

From the highway and from other places along this road we could easily see Homestake Peak in the distance—the summit above the hut that we planned to scale while there. At 13,209', it would be the highest ascent of our 10th Mountain trips, and also our first time over 13,000'.

That night we bought our perishables and booze, had a Filet Mignon dinner at Quincy's ($11.95 for 8 oz), and ended the day packing all our food and gear.