Northeastern student outdoors club is rebuilding its home in the White Mountains
After a 2015 fire, Northeastern’s Hus-Skiers and Outing Club is rebuilding its New Hampshire lodge, relying on alumni and student support to finish the project.
Evan Forcucci learned about the Hus-Skiers and Outing Club at Northeastern University even before he started his undergraduate studies. A neighbor — and fellow Husky — in his hometown of Winchester, Massachusetts, had been a member in the 1980s and encouraged him to join the student group right away.
Forcucci arrived at Northeastern in 2021 and interest in the club was high. Like other first-year students, he was eager to sign up for ski trips. It wasn’t until the spring semester of his second year, when he was on co-op and had free weekends, that he thought, “What if I actually went on one of these weekend trips?”
Forcucci, now a fifth-year electrical engineering student, not only built skills in climbing, skiing and outdoor survival through the club, but also took on leadership roles and learned carpentry and construction. Most of all, he said, he found a community.
“It was really the access to having this community of people supporting the endeavor to make these trips happen that made it feel so easy to go outdoors and do all this cool stuff,” he said.
Founded in 1941, Northeastern University Hus-Skiers and Outing Club is one of the oldest student organizations on campus. It has introduced thousands of students to outdoor recreation through dozens of trips each year.
For nearly 45 years, the club has operated from a piece of leased land known as the “Loj,” located in the northern White Mountains near Shelburne, New Hampshire. The property serves as a base for hiking, skiing, rock climbing, canoeing, kayaking and mountain biking. In 1971, students built the Brown Memorial Lodge on the site, named after Gordon H. Brown, one of the club’s founders, along with an original water pump, outhouse and swimming hole.
In 2015, the club lost the lodge to a fire. Students and graduates rallied to rebuild the permanent winter shelter, forming the NUHOC Build Committee. Although the permitting process took longer than anticipated, construction led by club members finally began last summer.
“It’s going to be about a 60-foot-by-24-foot structure with a kitchen, living room space with a wood stove and a dining table, and bunk rooms and lofts to sleep about 48 people,” Forcucci said.
Forcucci and Filip Musial, a recent Northeastern graduate who joined NUHOC as a freshman, have been among the leaders spearheading efforts to rebuild the lodge.
The Loj is close to several ski areas, including Sunday River Resort and Black Mountain in Maine and Wildcat and Loon Mountains in New Hampshire. In the winter, students currently sleep in an insulated “relatively cozy” canvas tent, Forcucci said.
“But it would be nice to have a real building, of course, to sleep more than 16 people or so in the winter. That’s not enough to meet demand,” he said.
About 50 people visit the Loj regularly throughout the year, Musial said, and a few hundred students participate in at least one trip each semester.
Many students first encounter the club through “Intro Trips” to the Loj, where they can try an outdoor activity for the first time. Older members provide training and peer support, and the club offers gear rentals including backpacks, sleeping bags, tents, snowshoes and kayaks.
The club pays for the land lease through the university-sponsored budget. Trip participants split the cost of gas and food, purchased in bulk.
“It’s usually maybe $30 a person for the weekend,” Forcucci said. “And if this still has a cost barrier, we have a mechanism to subsidize those costs.”
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The Loj property is managed by the Loj Committee, a group of NUHOC members trained to run trips and maintain the property. A committee member is present at every visit to the Loj. To become a Loj committee member, students must complete 26 training requirements covering safety, leadership, administration, groundskeeping, equipment and local knowledge. Membership comes with lifetime access to the Loj, and many graduates return regularly, particularly for the annual alumni weekend in September.
“We get people ranging from the 20s to 75 showing up,” Forcucci said. “It’s amazing just how committed everybody is.”
Almost all of the funds raised so far for the rebuilding of the lodge — nearly $150,000 — have come from donations from the club alumni network through a nonprofit established for this cause, the Northeastern Outing Club Association. The Build Committee estimates the total cost of the project at about $300,000.
Expenses have included tens of thousands of dollars for consultants to develop a fire protection plan suitable for an off-grid building without running water. The solution involved ultimately designing a commercial-grade fire alarm system and modifying staircases to improve egress, Forcucci said.
“Scope just expanded massively beyond what we originally thought,” he said.
Additional challenges included working with a structural engineer to produce stamped plans for the roof and timber frame. Forcucci also designed a solar array to reliably power the fire alarm system.
Most of the construction work has been completed by graduates and students, with Musial acting as the project’s foreman and planning each stage.
So far, NUHOC members have raised the timber frame of the future lodge and completed partial exterior sheathing. They’ve fully framed north and south lofts, while the central portion of the building and the roof remain unfinished.
“The original plan was to try and put a roof on the building before the major snowfall started,” Forcucci said. “But you know, nothing goes quite as fast as we planned for it to.”
Donations for the reconstruction of the lodge can be made online or via a check.
