Welcome to the Lost Wonder Hut

The hut is a historic cabin with modern amenities and offers a comfortable, cozy home base from which to hike, bike, ski, snowshoe, or just relax in the beautiful Middle Fork Valley of the South Arkansas River in Colorado’s southern Sawatch Range. Your next backcountry adventure begins here. We offer incredible multi-season opportunities to explore some of Colorado’s most breathtaking scenery from the comfort and safety of a rustic mountain lodge.

Lost Wonder Hut has been a family-owned business for over a decade, starting with a husband-and-wife team, Bobby and Natalie Lewis, which then transitioned to a mom-daughter team, and now is solo run by the daughter Jess.  When the Lewis family first became the owners of the hut, Bobby ran operations at the hut while Natalie ran the office side of things. Jess was just in high school when they first bought it and participated

in running the hut with occasional winter cleaning and wood chopping in the summer. In the last few years, Bobby and Natalie have passed the business to Jess, but you’re likely to still see Bobby out skiing with his dog Niña, or scrambling up the peaks. Bobby and Natalie put a lot of love and hard work into making the hut what it is today and Jess strives to bring the same level of love and dedication. It is a legacy she feels honored to be a part of. 

These days, you’re likely to catch Jess and her pup, Moki, on the trail and on the other end of the business line but the whole family can still be found skiing to the hut and romping through the mountains on any given day. Some of their collective adventures include: walking the CDT in 2006 when Jess was just a teenager, paddling the inside passage, traversing Antarctica, walking the PNT, climbing and guiding in all 7 continents, thousands of miles of whitewater navigated, and much much more. Owning the hut together has been an incredible journey to undertake and they are all grateful to all the people who have joined the hut family over the years. 

Sustainable Practices

At the hut, we strive to implement Leave No Trace principles into much of what we do, and we encourage you to do the same. We all love getting to recreate in these wild places, and it takes effort from everyone who visits to not only leave the area in good condition but also to help improve it. We love the idea that we are all stewards of the natural world, and our role is to protect and nourish it. As outdoor recreationists, we have an added incentive to do this because the health of the natural world is a key component of our sports. The following are some ways that the hut works to build sustainability and conservation into our practices. 

Fire Mitigation

Each year Lost Wonder Hut works to improve the health of the forest surrounding the hut. We have all seen the forests die due to beetle kill over the years and we all have either been impacted by large wildfires or know somebody else who has. At the hut, we have been cutting and clearing dead trees for the last twelve years. Not only does this open up the forest to new growth, but it also takes away fodder for large fires coming through the area. This wood in turn becomes the firewood for the hut. Next time you are up there take note of the difference between the trees surrounding the hut, which are generally alive and healthy, and the rest of the mountainside. Our goal is to steadily work outward and continue to clear the dead trees from our land and bring the forest back into a place of equilibrium. 

Wildlife Habitat

In 1999 Colorado began a program of reintroducing the Lynx into the mountains and over the last 20+ years, the program has both seen success and has been a contentious topic in wildlife policy. We happen to love that they are back in the mountains and believe that they, along with all other predators who are native to the area, have every right to be here.  We believe in balance and in living harmoniously with the natural world. We hope that when you are at the hut you respect the wildlife that is around and enjoy it too!

When we clear dead trees from the forest as part of our fire mitigation efforts we are left with a lot of branches and slash on the forest floor. Fortunately, when these are piled together they create a habitat for Snowshoe hares which are the primary food source for the Lynx. About 80% of a Lynx’s diet is the hare but they also eat Ptarmigan, which have also been found nesting in our slash piles. If you see one of these incredible creatures up at the hut please let us know! 

Products We Use 

We have tried over the years to use increasingly sustainable products and to provide our guests with alternate options for some paper products. For example, we stock rags at the hut as well as paper towels to be used in cleaning and we hope people trend towards using the rags. We provide Biokleen biodegradable dish soap and Simple Green as our cleaning products. There is a recycle can up at the hut and hope that you all will use it and then sort your things appropriately when you get home. We collect newspapers from a local high school and put them out as fire starter.

We know that there is always more we can be doing to improve our sustainability practices and we are open to suggestions! We tried recycled TP but it was so thin that our guests went through it very quickly.

Merchandise

Coming soon! We are opening up a small online store with Lost Wonder Hut merchandise and are proud to say that we have sourced many of our products from companies that follow sustainable practices. We have partnered with Souled Out T-shirts and Rocky Mountain Engraving to bring you all LWH shirts and mugs! Our shirts are produced by a small company called Allmade and you can read more about their story and practices here.