That night, after a turkey dinner, mint-chocolate brownies and a tour of alpine flora, I joined a poker game with a group of young flask-toting fathers as the melting sun turned the sky from orange to mauve. Scotch took the edge off the evening chill and my losses.

The next morning, the sun was rising in ocher tones as I stumbled outside to take in dawn’s silence. After coffee, pancakes and bacon, a member of the crew read the weather report radioed down from the Mount Washington Observatory: clouds would arrive midday, then worse. I packed and headed out for Mount Adams and its sub-peaks named for Sam Adams, John Quincy Adams and — thanks to a 2010 petition by a hut crew alumna named Bethany Taylor — Abigail Adams, the only lady in the range. Mount Adams is the second-highest peak in New England, after Mount Washington. It took me 45 minutes to reach the top of an unrelenting rock-pile trail. Soon a young “thru-hiker” trudging from Georgia to Maine appeared between the fractured mica schist and gnarled gneiss of Jefferson and Clay peaks. And soon he was gone from sight, plodding north. In a month’s time, he’d be done, beard shaved, trying his best to fit back into society.

Less than a mile from 6,288-foot Mount Washington, I sat down, beat, and ate some pepperoni I’d brought along. Two spry older women approached through the gathering mist. One asked if I was a thru-hiker. “A long time ago,” I said. She turned to the other: “I told you they come back to do it slow.”

Before long I was at the cloudy top, which until 2010 claimed the highest wind speed ever recorded on land: 231 miles per hour. It was gusting at only 30, so I queued up behind a guy who’d taken the Mount Washington Cog Railway up for the obligatory summit shot. Then I headed to the incongruous snack bar for a hot dog and a sit next to a thru-hiker using an iPad.

At Lakes of the Clouds hut that night, after the seven-and-a-half-mile hike from Madison, I met still more thru-hikers. Two, whose “trail names” were Knight Rider (he sounded like the talking car from the ’80s TV show) and Prometheus (she was good at building fires), gave a talk to 40 guests; in exchange they would sleep free on the hut’s warm, dry floor. The take-away from their long walk so far: people are more generous than you expect. One hiker said that a man had picked him up at a roadside in Virginia, and provided meals, movies and a hotel room. I remembered coaxing fried chicken from more than one church picnic I had passed.

A 23-year-old named Jeff Pedersen looked on as his crew did dishes; he was the “hut master.” At 5,012 feet, Lakes is the highest and biggest hut — it can shelter up to 110 per night and requires a crew of 10 — and a hive of activity. An hour ago, the crew had erupted in a clanging kitchen jam, using pots and pans to announce dinner. As the rain started to fall, and the temperature dipped into the 40s outside, Lakes was what all the huts are at their core: an alpine refuge full of contented strangers.