After spending five years transforming a ramshackle 140-year-old structure at the foot of a 13,000-foot pass into one of Colorado’s most unique backcountry huts, the moment of truth had arrived for Jeff Crane and partner Kate McCoy. A Park County building inspector was on site to give the historic preservation project a final lookover before signing the certificate of occupancy.

It had been their dream to turn what remained of the North London Mine Office, built in 1883, into a backcountry destination. They lined up historic preservation grants, determined to rehabilitate the building in a manner that was faithful to its original appearance. They defied skeptics who didn’t think it could be done.

And so, when the building inspector signed off on it just before Thanksgiving in 2023, Crane felt a flood of emotion.

“I called Kate, told her, ‘I got it,’ and we were both kind of in tears,” Crane said recently on a visit to the hut, 7 miles west of Alma near Fairplay. “It was five years, and people said, ‘You’ll never be able to do it.’ Or, ‘It’ll take 10 years or more,’ all sorts of reasons why it wasn’t going to happen. We did it, people love it, and we’re pretty happy about it.”

The hut, which sits adjacent to the remains of the historic North London Mill, had a soft opening last winter and is now available for reservations. Situated in a magnificent basin at 11,450 feet, it sleeps six to eight with hot and cold running water, a shower, a kitchen stocked with utensils, a flush toilet, solar electricity and WiFi from Starlink. There also is an old Victrola record player that belonged to McCoy’s grandmother — and it still works.

Proving the hut is accessible for families, Robyn Paulekas and partner Bevan Frost of Frisco recently stayed there with their two sons, ages 11 and 8. The hut is less than 2 miles from the trailhead with an ascent of less than 500 feet, which their boys had no trouble climbing.

“It was great,” Paulekas said as the family skied back down to the trailhead on a gentle grade. “It’s a super family-friendly hut. We even got to take a shower. We just had a delightful time. The ski-in is doable for little kids, and you’re in the middle of this big basin, there are mountains all around, and the mill is really cool.”

Frost found it notable that the hut’s architecture is quite different from the log cabin style seen in most of Colorado’s backcountry huts.

“It has windows on every side, and in every room,” Frost said. “And the fact that it’s on an open meadow means you really feel like you are at treeline, even when you’re in the house.”

As much as possible, Crane and McCoy tried to make the building look like it did 140 years ago.

“Most of what was here you can’t see, because we ‘sistered’ to the original framing,” McCoy said, referring to a process by which a new piece of material is attached to an existing structural piece for reinforcement. “A lot of the wood in the rafters and the joists is original. The windows are where the windows were. The dimensions are what the dimensions were.”

The hut and the mill are situated at the foot of London Mountain, a beautiful peak where miners dug for gold beginning in the 1880s.

“There are tunnels that go all the way through it from north to south,” Crane said, “over a hundred miles of tunnels.”

A fourth-generation Coloradan, Crane first saw what was left of the mill and the office in the summer of 2016 while hiking during a bachelor gathering assembled for his brother’s wedding. He was “staggered” by the beauty of the site and began to dream about developing its potential. He initially thought it might work as a backcountry ski operation, but the focus soon shifted to historical preservation and turning the building into a year-round overnight destination.

He and McCoy decided to make the effort a non-profit and went after grant funding. It helped that McCoy had spent 10 years in New York City, supporting herself by writing research grants and working on research teams.

“We found out that Colorado has some of the best historic preservation funding in the country,” Crane said.

There was precedent for their effort. Not far away on Boreas Pass, 6 miles southeast of Breckenridge, there are two backcountry huts that were originally erected in the 19th century as buildings serving the Denver, South Park and Pacific narrow gauge railway that operated the line from 1882 to 1937. Those buildings were restored in the 1990s, using historic preservation funding. They are owned by the Summit Huts Association and are reserved through the 10th Mountain Division Hut Association.

“Boreas Pass was the model,” Crane said.

Crane and McCoy were able to pull together more than $1 million from sources that included History Colorado’s State Historical Fund, which awards grants funded by limited-stakes gambling in Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek for the preservation of historic significant buildings, districts and archaeology sites. Other grants came from Park County, the South Park National Heritage Area, the Gates Family Foundation, the El Pomar Foundation, the J.M. McDonald Foundation and private donors.

“This is not a return-on-investment kind of thing,” Crane said. “The beauty is, we don’t owe anybody any money, because the whole thing’s been paid for with grant funding, and it’s not our primary source of income. We can rent it or not rent it as much as we need or want to.

“Sustainability was always the primary goal,” Crane added, “for it to sustain itself and sustain our ability to do it.”

According to a timeline compiled by McCoy, who pored through historical records and Fairplay Flume newspaper archives, construction began at the North London site in the late 1870s. A railroad spur to the mine was built in the early 1880s. The mine office was built in 1883 for work space and a setting to entertain wealthy investors visiting from the East Coast.

The mill and mine office aren’t the only historic aspects of Mosquito Gulch. The Mosquito Pass Road passes the North London site and climbs another 1,700 feet to the pass before descending to Leadville. Over that route, an itinerant Methodist preacher named John Lewis Dyer arguably pioneered ski mountaineering in Colorado during the 19th-century Gold Rush years, carrying mail between Alma and Leadville on 10-foot wooden skis known at the time as Norwegian snowshoes.

“Basically the first backcountry skiing in Colorado was up there,” Crane said.

A stained glass rendering of Dyer was installed at the state capitol in 1900, along with 15 other “Colorado pioneers,” and he was included as one of the inaugural inductees into the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame in 1977.

In the summer, the hut will remain available for overnight stays, but Crane and McCoy also use it for historical and archeological workshops, art presentations and music events. Summer visitors may learn how the valley got its name, and it may sting.

“There’s a reason it’s called Mosquito Gulch,” Crane said. “But they’re big and slow. You can just grab them out of the air.”

Crane has taught art history at Mercy University in New York. McCoy will retire this summer as a professor of educational foundations at State University of New York in New Paltz.

“I’m trying to create something that fosters art making and art communities in a place that, to me, is a work of art,” Crane said. “We look at the mill as a sculpture. We’ve done some stabilization, thanks to funding from the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, and we hope to get additional funding to continue preserving it.

“We’ll use it for concerts and events, historic interpretation, and as a landmark — a monument.”