In Colorado’s backcountry huts, veterans find solace and history
By Stephen Lezak
November 11, 2021
Amanda Ingle, left, and Cathy Drew prepare to hike out of the Gates Hut back to the trailhead after a three-day retreat with Huts for Vets outside of Meredith on Sunday, June 20, 2021. Ingle is the Secretary for Huts for Vets and lives in Rifle. Drew is also a Colorado local, living in Grand Junction, and served in the Air Force for 4 years.
Kelsey Brunner/For CPR News
Amanda Ingle, left, and Cathy Drew prepare to hike out of the Gates Hut back to the trailhead after a three-day retreat with Huts for Vets outside of Meredith on Sunday, June 20, 2021. Ingle is the Secretary for Huts for Vets and lives in Rifle. Drew is also a Colorado local, living in Grand Junction, and served in the Air Force for 4 years.
On a postcard-perfect day outside a backcountry hut in Colorado’s Sawatch Range, a group of five female veterans stands in a circle, learning Qigong and laughing.
It doesn’t show, but these women were strangers until three days ago. They came together for this long weekend with a common purpose: to share their experiences of military trauma and heal. Now, after three emotional days, these veterans are celebrating the completion of what they call “the curriculum.”
To the uninitiated, Qigong looks like a mix of yoga and interpretive dance. One of the veterans, Amanda Williams, jokingly calls it “Dr. Strange.” But everyone participates with gusto.
The exercise is a welcome break from hours spent inside the Harry Gates Hut, gathered around a small wooden table and surrounded by the history of a different group of veterans: the 10th Mountain Division of World War II. Like the women gathered here today, veterans of the 10th Mountain Division also sought solace in the Colorado backcountry —but fewer soldiers of that generation spoke openly about the trauma they endured.
Kelsey Brunner/For CPR News
Veterans Amanda Williams, 37, left, and Natalie Solano, 33, laugh at photos from the three-day retreat with Huts for Vets on Monday, June 21, 2021. Both women travelled from out of state for the retreat. Williams is from Minnesota and Solano is from California. Solano is an ex-marine and worked as a prison guard at Camp Pendleton.
A place of quiet
The retreat is facilitated by Huts for Vets, a Basalt-based nonprofit that organizes free retreats for veterans using the network of backcountry huts built in honor of the 10th Mountain Division.
Unlike some outdoor-oriented veterans’ programs, the vision behind these retreats has little to do with adventure or adrenaline.
“Up here, you get to disconnect from everything,” says Williams, who served in Iraq as a Navy hospital corpsman and later as an intelligence officer in the Army National Guard. “You’re connecting with one another.”
A key vehicle for that connection comes in the form of a hand-bound book given to each participant at the beginning of the retreat.
The books contain an eclectic mix of readings. Essays by American naturalists are interspersed with writings by Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, Oglala Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear, and several American war veterans.
In one entry, novelist Cara Hoffman writes, “society may come to understand war differently if people could see it through the eyes of women who’ve experienced both giving birth and taking life.”
Some entries are less literal. “We can live any way we want,” writes Annie Dillard in a short essay entitled, “Living Like Weasels.” “The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.” Huts for Vets’ Executive Director Paul Andersen created the curriculum. In Andersen’s view, the readings are central to the program’s success. “When you marry text with immersion, something positive is going to happen,” he says.
Kelsey Brunner/For CPR News
Huts for Vets participants and board members left handwritten notes in the Gates Hut logbook after the retreat on Sunday, June 20, 2021.
In practice, the curriculum scaffolds the retreat’s central goal: conversations about military trauma. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that between 11 to 20 percent of recent veterans have post-traumatic stress disorder.
For some of the women on this particular trip, their trauma comes from experiences of combat. For others, it comes from sexual assault or harassment that occurred while they were enlisted, which they refer to as MST — military sexual trauma. The VA reports that 23 percent of women veterans experienced sexual assault while enlisted.
Back at the hut, Williams speaks candidly about her experiences with both sorts of trauma. She returned to civilian life in 2010 and became a firefighter in Minnesota. It’s her military background, she says, that taught her how to act quickly and stay calm in dangerous settings. “I thrive when there’s trauma situations.”
Even so, opening up to non-veterans about her experiences in the military remains difficult. “It's hard to put that in a perspective for someone who's never been there,” she says.
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