Getting to the hut
The Bradley Hut is located near Silver Peak, 4.7 miles from the Pole Creek trailhead where BR 08 intersects with Hwy 89. Guests should expect an elevation gain of approximately 1,600 ft. Be cautious of avalanche danger in the area.
The Bradley Hut closes temporarily in May every year to minimize disturbances to wildlife in the area. The hut typically reopens in October.
Parking
- Overnight parking is available on a wide shoulder where Pole Creek Trailhead meets Hwy 89, about six miles south of I-80. Drivers need to ensure their vehicles are behind snow stakes.
- Topo maps: Granite Chief and Tahoe City 7-1/2′ quads.
- 1. Bradley Hut
Hut history
The Bradley Hut was originally built in 1957 in Five Lakes Basin between Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows to memorialize Josephine Bradley, wife of former Sierra Club president, Harold C. Bradley. In 1997-99, the hut was relocated to Pole Creek after Five Lakes became part of Granite Chief Wilderness.
Bradley family history
Harold C. Bradley was the son of UC Berkeley professor Cornelius Bradley, a close friend of John Muir and founding member of the Sierra Club. As a boy, Harold spent much time exploring the San Francisco Bay Area. During summers, there were family camping trips to the Sierra Nevada. He graduated from the University of California in 1900, took a PhD in chemistry at Yale, and accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin, where he remained until retiring in 1948.
Going on outings with his family, such as one to Switzerland with his sons in which they stayed in a chain of huts in the Alps, inspired Bradley in the 1920s to write of a time when a chain of similar huts would link Echo Summit with Donner Summit in the Sierras. Thirty years later, Bradley proposed the fourth and final hut in the chain built by the Sierra Club as a memorial to his wife Josephine, who had died in 1952. Bradley Hut was built during 1957, the first of his two years as Sierra Club president.
Josephine Crane was a student at the University of Wisconsin when she met her future husband. Born deaf, she had remained functionally deaf, dumb, and illiterate until age eight when she came under the wing of Alexander Graham Bell. After learning lip reading, she quickly caught up academically, breezed through grade school and high school, became a gifted dramatist and conversationalist, learned French and German while traveling with her father, and picked up American Sign Language so she could communicate with Helen Keller.
Josephine and Harold had eight children. The first, Mary, died at age seven; seven brothers followed and survived her. Several became MDs or PhDs themselves; two, like their father, were inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame.
