Andrew Miller grew up in his family’s ski lodge, where ski vacations meant staying in pine paneled rooms and eating family style at long tables - meeting new ski buddies at Millers Idlewild Inn in Winter Park. As a teenager he visited European huts, similar to cabins being built in the Colorado mountains. He began a search for a site for a cabin, finding the Lonesome Hut property in 1995. Family and friends jumped into the foray, a mad summer of road building and remote construction - fed by an old Chevy one ton named Frankenstein - resulted in the cabin being opened (in a pretty rustic state) for Christmas. Only trouble was, the frenetic construction schedule had left the cabin without a winter supply of firewood. Numerous boot packed trails led to new stumps through a huge snow winter as Miller carried log after log to feed the hungry pot belly stove.

For the past 14 years the cabin has hosted 23 blind skiers from England (and several other not-as-large groups from Winter Park’s National Center for the Disabled), several Middle Park High School science classes on overnight trips, a group of at risk teenage boys from the Lost and Found School in Denver who built a neat trail named after their school - while begging me to let them use the chain saw "just once!", a few marriage proposals and many other events I know, or should not know about. Lonesome Hut LLC is now a group effort, my partners in this enterprise lend their energy to a refuge we hope you might get a chance to enjoy one day.