For many Dartmouth students, a mention of “the Lodge” might spark visions of First-Year Trips, flair and the chaos of hundreds of students after spending the previous three days isolated in the wilderness. But those two weeks in early September when the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge is bursting with nervous freshmen and covered in signs, streamers and balloons only represent a small portion of the Lodge’s character.
Moosilauke Ravine Lodge manager Margaret Nichols ’20 said that she believes the primary mission of the Lodge is to “foster community” across both the Dartmouth population and the Lodge’s employees, also known as crew members.
“Since there’s no cell service, when you’re there … you’re just there with the people across the table from you,” Nichols said. “We create a space for other people to come up and enjoy the space and each other together.”
The crew’s passion for their jobs is evident through one of the institution’s main services: Lodge dinners. At 6:30 p.m. every night, excluding Tuesdays, the Lodge serves a “family-style” dinner, which is free to Dartmouth undergraduates and open to members of the public who make reservations.
Alan Hatch ’25 — who has attended “five or six Lodge dinners” — started going to the meals after a few of his friends worked on Lodge Crew during their sophomore year off-terms.
“They usually start off with bread, soup and a salad, then they’ll bring out an entree and they’ll bring out dessert,” Hatch said. “People from the dining crew will come out and talk to you before dessert. They’ll introduce themselves … what they’re doing there [and] where they’re at in life.”
These introductions, known as “dinner talks,” according to Nichols, are one of her favorite aspects of the job, and may include poems, songs or even facts about the speaker’s favorite tree — Nichols’s topic of choice. The speaker on any given night has about 10 minutes of “free reign”; over time, this provides all crew members with a moment in the spotlight. According to Nichols, these talks bridge the divide between guests and crew members by allowing guests to learn more about the Lodge through conversations and reflections.
On special occasions, the Lodge adds an additional component to their dinners by introducing a theme. For example, for “Lodge-O-Ween,” a meal that occurs on Halloween, Nichols and her crew put up extensive decorations. The crew also facilitates Contra Dancing — a type of square dancing — nights, among other festivities.
In addition to serving dinner, the Lodge also provides a space for alumni and organizations to host events. Both First-Year Trips and Dartmouth Reunions use the Lodge, in addition to alumni and community members, who rent it for weddings, celebrations of life and even bar mitzvahs. Nichols, who is in charge of planning these events, tries to balance rental requests to ensure “there’s space for undergrads to come.”
“We could book up every weekend for a wedding if we wanted to, and we don’t want to,” she said. “We could fill up from alums and the public who plan two years in advance … undergrads are going to plan three days in advance. So it’s really trying to strategize how we can make sure undergrads are centered in space.”
For theme nights, dinners and day-to-day functions, the Lodge Crew rotates through a multitude of jobs — including cooking, cleaning, serving and working the front desk. Behind the scenes, the Lodge Crew works hard to ensure these functions go off without a hitch. To do so, Nichols first hires employees — based on applications submitted through the Lodge’s website — for each of the Lodge’s three seasons: spring, summer and fall.
“I’m constantly hiring and training because we have three different seasons,” she said. “I’m hiring three crews, training them all, and you can’t just train and walk away, you have to be part of it.”
Once new hires go through training, crew members and managers rotate through a series of jobs that all contribute to the function of the Lodge. Isabel Zaltz ’25, who was a member of Lodge Crew during her off-term last fall, said that there are “two types of days working at the Lodge.”
“There are multiple different types of jobs you can have, and everyone who works there rotates which job they have,” she said.
According to Zaltz, the job rotation consists of “day-desker, a normal day shift doing the duties at the front desk”; then, there is the “meals-desker, [who is] in the kitchen during and after dinner service.” Unsurprisingly, another rotation is “cooking all day in the kitchen”; finally, there is “serving: from 5 [p.m.] until you finish cleaning, you are running the food out.”
In addition to being an employee of the Lodge, Zaltz also served as the Lodj Croo Captain for First Year Trips in the fall of 2024. Zaltz said that Trips was much more hectic than her time on Lodge Crew, which instead was “a term of a lot of reflection and reading.”
“I think the fall at the Lodge is so beautiful, and it’s also really calm,” she said. “A lot of people … only know the Lodge through Trips … [and] getting them to come back during the fall when it’s more of an escape from the social buzz of campus is also super important.”
According to Simon Thomas ’27, who worked on Lodge Crew this past summer, the Lodge functions “the closest … to Trips” during the summer term due to large crowds from reunion weekends and anniversary parties.
“The first few weeks [of summer] would serve somewhere around 200 to 250 people on Friday, Saturday and Sunday dinners,” he said
While Thomas enjoyed the energy that came from larger dinners, he found that more intimate meals were equally rewarding.
“It’s really rewarding to be done with a meal for 110 people, but it’s also really rewarding to spend a lot of time crafting something for 25 or 30 people,” he said.
Similarly, Zaltz added that developing her cooking skills and sharing her abilities with others was among her favorite parts of being on Lodge Crew.
“Getting to cook big dinners was really cool, especially taking recipes like my grandma’s soup recipe that I grew up eating and getting to share that with the Dartmouth community,” she said.
Whether it’s through the tight-knit community that comes from being a member of Lodge Crew, or getting a break from the outside world to enjoy some of the most quintessential parts of the Dartmouth spirit — nature, community and, of course, food — the Lodge provides a space to both reminisce on old memories and create new ones.
“One of the reasons Lodge is really cool is because it is a place that’s easy to maintain a relationship with after you graduate,” Nichols explained. “You’re not going to walk through your old dorm or where you took classes, but you can come to the Lodge forever and sit down with each other … and you can see the students carrying [the culture] forward.”
