AMC huts and the wilder Whites
Threads on the AMC huts usually get a lot of responses, even luring lurkers to say something.
The huts evoke passions...and ambivalence.
A recent trip to Lakes of the Clouds found so many camp girls making so much (happy) noise in the hut that I had to leave quickly and find my quiet place by the lake. Then again, no doubt that some of my best moments in the mountains have been at Lakes of the Clouds. As far as the issue of the impact of the AMC huts on the environment, it probably is best to differentiate and consider history and irony. There was a building, often shabby, in Carter Notch long before the AMC built its hut. Lonesome Lake got its start as a private fishing camp. (Some of the RMC buildings also started as private cabins). Madison started as an RMC-like shelter for more than 20 years before it slowly evolved to "full-service" with a "hut keeper", mainly to keep campers from burning the nearby scrub (and the hut shutters and floorboards). The AMC's purchase of the site of Madison hut and much of the lower Snyder brook valley approach saved that lovely forest from the logging that took much of the lower forest on the Northern Presidentials (and sent JR Edmands sadly away to make a trail on Mt Pleasant). Galehead and Mizpah occupy the sites of former shelters that had become foul eyesores, esp. Mizpah.
IMHO the huts have done more to protect the fragile environment than to hurt it, maybe inadvertently. Without Madison, Lakes, Zealand and Greenleaf huts, the area around Star Lake, Lakes of the Clouds, Zealand Pond, and Eagle Lakes would have been long since demolished by campers before anyone had the notion or the regulatory ability to restrict above-treeline camping. Even today, while many people hike to those sites, they usually go to the huts, not to the lakes.
The good news is that things have been getting better for quite a while.
The White Mountains, so close to so many millions of people, may be the only mountains in the US that are wilder now than they were years ago, when lumber barons laid their tracks and started fires, when hotels crowned several summits, when private camps were high on the N. Presidentials, when the B&M was about to build an electric trolley up Caps Ridge to the summit of Washington (you can still find some survey markers), and when federal planners envisioned a skyline drive on the S. Presidentials. Whew, so glad we escaped that!
If you want mountain camaraderie, go to the huts. If you want mountain solitude, well, as many have posted here, there's no lack of choices.
It's still possible to sit on a rock high on Mt Washington and see a view like the one seen by Darby Field.