Day 0: 18 June, 0 miles today, 0 miles total, Burlington, VT
There was no escape from the fact that my decision to hike the Long Trail seemed frivolous, timed as was just as my homeland was accelerating its slide into the sort of literal fascism my middle-class education had always promised was impossible in America. In some ways it mirrored my disappearance into the forest-carpeted mountains of the Appalachian Trail in 2017, when Trump’s naked incompetence and authoritarian bravado could still be seen as comical—a dangerous and murderous clown, but a clown nonetheless. But in 2025, that joke wasn’t funny anymore.
When I left for Vermont, the administration was publicly toying with the idea of joining a war a war of aggression and choice against the civilian population of Iran, themselves victims of the hardline right-wing fundamentalist government. Even this was a mask for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the momentum for which had increased ever since Trump had proposed ridding the region of the Palestinian population to create a “Rivieria of the Middle East.” Meanwhile, he and his people promoted the theories and iconographies of avowed antisemites at home, while working to demonize and persecute trans people and immigrants, blaming DEI for the dysfunction of the civil society they were actively dismantling in order to transfer as much of the people’s wealth as they could manage upward to the ruling class. At a time like that, what the fuck was I thinking running off to play in the woods? What good would that accomplish?
Of course, what good had I accomplished at home in North Carolina? I’d spent the first months of Trump’s authoritarian breakthrough overwhelmed and numbed by the constant deluge of gleeful cruelty and smug idiocy. This was, of course, the point, but realizing that didn’t make it less effective. I was angry and stressed out all the time, but the energy that left me with was scattershot and erratic and thus far I hadn’t been able to do anything with it. Maybe what I actually needed was to actively engage with something I loved, something unimportant that was nonetheless important to me, something that depended on the vitality of the world the fascists were working to destroy, and that thrived within a community that by its nature and existence was opposed to the very idea that the land, and the people in it, existed only for their exploitation by the most morally bankrupt among us.
And so I found myself in Burlington, VT, sitting on a shaded swinging bench on the eastern shores of Lake Champlain. I was alone here. Sean Meadows had real work to do back home, and I hadn’t thought to even try to bring anyone else with me. I didn’t know anyone in this place, but even so every step seemed to bring me someplace that felt right. I’d wandered the evening before into a random bar a couple of blocks from my hostel, having seen only that they were charging a $15 cover for some band out of Minnesota I’d never heard of. I had no way of knowing they would play the kind of melodic, fuzzed-out jams that had always filled me with a frantic need to pick up an instrument, any instrument, and just play—nor could have predicted the way I’d be moved by the singer’s admission of the way the state of things had lately left her stymied and powerless in grief and confusion as she introduced the band’s rendition of a mournful traditional ballad. She was sharing her frail and beating heart with us, this crowd of strangers, and it was as much a comfort as it was a surprise to discover it was my own, as well.
Even the book I’d brought with me, a collection of essays on the inseparable nature of writing and politics by Ta-Nehisi Coates, seemed to reflect my own thoughts back at me. “My first instinct is to laugh,” I read as I swung the bench lightly back and forth with one toe, “but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.” Hadn’t I just been thinking the exact same thing?
I’ve never been one of those people who believes in fate, that everything happens for a reason and the universe guides us where we need to be. I think reason and meaning are things that we create for ourselves, and that process is more often than not messy and permanently incomplete. But even so, sometimes you just kinda know you’re in the right place at the right time.
I rarely feel excitement for things so much as a kind of buzzing, nervous anxiety. It’s just the way my mind is built. My country was burning from the inside out and I was headed into the wilderness on a foot still bruised and painful from my two-day jaunt on the Art Loeb Trail. I had no idea what to expect as I left the world of epsom salt baths and instantaneous news updates, but as I sat on the banks of Lake Champlain I felt a kind of quiet hope for the days and weeks and months and years ahead. As the steady breeze blew through my hair and out across the water toward the rolling green mountains beyond, I thought again of a line from a song that had caught me the evening before, sung cleanly and plaintively into the microphone before the small crowd standing in rapt attention in front of the stage:
Through the cracks, one seed at a time,
I give back what was never mine.
Day 1: Juneteenth, 9.7 miles today, 9.7 miles total, Jay Peak, Jay State Forest
Days without rain: 0
The Long Trail—while far from being the nation’s longest footpath—is nonetheless its oldest. It is the original thru-hike, conceived in 1909 by the assistant principal of a posh prep school while he probably should have been focused on the education of Vermont’s most spoiled children, and completed in 1930 by the Green Mountain Club, a network of volunteers assembled specifically for the purpose of building this trail. It spans the length of its home state from the Massachusetts border at its southern end to the Canadian border at its north. Some 272 miles long, the LT saunters along the spine of the same Green Mountain range that, through the sort of linguistic bastardization common to American English, gave the state its name by way of the original French.*
taken at the Mt. Mansfield Visitor Center
The trail shares its southernmost 100 miles with the Appalachian Trail, the ambitious younger protégé which was inspired by the Long Trail but which would eventually eclipse its mentor both in length and celebrity. Even so, the LT is notorious among AT hikers for its wild and difficult terrain. Thru-hikers who come to the Appalachians after completing a hike of the Long Trail talk about it in hushed and troubled tones, as if speaking its name might somehow awaken its twisted and difficult miles and draw them back under the hiker’s traumatized feet. “The Long Trail,” a friend said to me as we were navigating the AT’s famously steep and challenging way through New Hampshire’s rugged White Mountains, “is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
I had chosen, against the advice of literally everyone I’d read or spoken to who had previously hiked the LT, to start at the trail’s northern terminus and hike southbound, or SOBO. The prevailing wisdom was to work up to the trail’s harder miles by starting with the relatively easier AT section, but as it had never taken me less than 500 miles—almost the double the length of the LT—to truly get my trail legs, I never quite saw the sense in that approach. If nothing could quite prepare my doughy, non-hiking body for the northern half of the trail, I figured as I may just as well start there, and work my way toward the more populated regions of the path. The only problem was getting there—the northern reaches of the Green Mountains are wild and remote. So the first step, after getting myself from my home in the foothills of the Black Mountains of North Carolina, was to take a shuttle that would get me close enough to the trail for me to hike in to the terminus.
I’d spent a lot of time in advance fretting over how I was going to get to the trail, but in the end all I had to do was send an email to one of the contacts on the list sent to me by the Green Mountain Club and I was set. All that remained were two hours of awkward small talk as the driver took me from the hostel to the tiny dirt turnout that served as the trailhead for the Journey’s End Trail, the 1.3 mile spur I’d have to walk to get to the Canadian border, the Long Trail’s northern terminus, and my journey’s beginning. The driver, a friendly retiree who had proven no better than me at making chit chat, but who had offered several helpful tips about the trail, had been gone for all of two minutes when I realized I was missing the compression sleeve I’d brought to protect my injured foot. It was at that moment probably still sitting next to the hostel bed where’d I’d set it specifically so I’d remember to put it on, some two hours away back in Burlington. There was nothing to do now but hope I wouldn’t actually need it.
Vermont is notorious among AT hikers for its loose, wet soil—which is how it gets its common nickname, Vermud**—and indeed my feet were soaked and dirty before I even reached the start of the trail. This would prove to be one of the prominent themes of my first day on the long trail, not just the mud but the occasional bog with a series of long, parallel logs fixed together with rustic nails that continually caught my shoes. These were the only bridges across, and as I prodded the muck with my trekking poles for stability, it was not comforting to find that it apparently had no bottom.
The day was overcast from the start, with clouds that sagged low over the mountains like curtains too long for the window in which they’ve been hung. Every so often I’d find what would have been a good view on a clear day—such as the clear-cut at the Canadian border, which I’ve heard is meant to make it possible to catch people sneaking across the border, though in which direction was never specified—but the clouds kept the sky close and the neighboring peaks impossibly far away. It may have been just as well, since I would likely have been too preoccupied with the day’s other prominent theme to have noticed the scenery.
As promised, the LT was ridiculously, almost comically demanding. The trail was incredibly steep, and I frequently had to scramble over a given boulder or tree with a hand gripped tight over a branch or a rock. Much of the path was overgrown, not with underbrush but with thick tree branches that left me confetti’d with fir needles after I’d pushed my way through. Progress was slow, every footstep a problem that needed to solved and a workout to put into practice. By the time I was caught in the afternoon‘s thunderstorm I’d already been soaked through for hours in sweat. My balls became chafed and bright pink—a problem I’d never once had in all my previous thousands of miles of hiking and one I had no idea how to solve in the middle of nowhere, Vermont.
I pushed myself to make the climb up Jay Peak, a wintertime ski slope with a gondola that runs year round. The ride and its attendant cafe were both closed for the day, which suited me just fine. I set up a makeshift camp in the unlocked vestibule, hoping that when the morning found me I would be warm and dry and ready to make a few more miles than I’d managed on day one.
*Vert (green) + Mont (mount, or mountain)
**I’ve never loved this awkward portmanteau, but it is nonetheless still more euphonious than Rocksylvania
Day 2: 20 June, 13.1 miles today, 22.8 miles total, Tillotson Camp, Long Trail State Forest
Days without rain: 0
I slept fitfully under the vestibule’s bright motion-activated light, which popped on any time turned or fidgeted, and awoke with a June bug in my hair. The only mystery greater than where it had come from was what on earth it wanted to do with me.
It had been my hope to get below the treeline before the rain started, but the trail had other plans. Immediately leaving the Jay Peak gondola, it shot straight up a granite haystack, where it meandered uncomfortably as the grey morning sky began to spit. I noticed after a while that a flat, wide ski run was running parallel to the trail, but now there was no safe way down to it. 20 minutes later, in what had become a driving rain, the trail recrossed the ski run and headed into the trees. If I’d stuck to the grass it would have taken less than five minutes to cover the same ground.
Going down a mountain is always much harder than going up. This is true for most people—the descent is generally a lot harder on your ankles and knees—but sometimes I wonder whether my height gives me an added disadvantage. At 6’1”, my feet appear as I’m looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope, which of course further complicates a steep and treacherous downward slope already made difficult by the sheen of running water that was now flowing down the mountain. Hiking over rough terrain in a cold rain isn’t terribly fun, and I spent most of the long, wet morning in a sort of fugue state, coming back to my surroundings anytime I had to scale another boulder or pick my way across another bog.
Most of the rock faces would actually have been pretty easy to scale if they’d been dry, but even after the rain finally gave out in the afternoon water ran continually over, down, along, and through the trail, leaving them slippery as a balloon dipped in oil. Time and again I found myself pulling myself up (or lowering myself down) along a set of exposed roots, essentially climbing a tree without ever actually leaving the ground. It was rare that I could take more than a dozen or two dozen steps at stride before coming again to some other obstacle that left me crawling—sometimes literally—down the trail. I’d hoped to make it farther than the four-walled shelter renowned in the guide for its view of the neighboring mountains through a small break in the pines, but even though I had a few hours of daylight left I was utterly spent by the time I’d made it that far. Another short mileage day on the Long Trail. I was starting to worry I hadn’t left myself enough time to make it all the way to the end.
Day 3: 21 June, 14.5 miles today, 37.3 miles total, Corliss Camp, Long Trail State Forest
Days without rain: 1
The pair of cheerful 20-something stoners I’d shared the Tillotson shelter had cautioned me about the blowdowns blanketing the wide crown of Mt. Belvedere. They’d also make clear their relative inexperience in the woods, so I wasn’t sure how much weight to give this warning. “Is that normal?” the taller of two had asked. He was taking a few days off from his job at a dispensary in Burlington to hike into a commune tucked somewhere in the mountains I’d just crossed, where he’d meet the rest of his band for a gig. I told him I’d seen a few downed trees, myself—but these were nothing, as it turned out, of the magnitude for which he has tried to prepare me. Around every bend was a giant pine which had, in the fury of its demise, taken out one or two other trees along with it, usually a birch or a juvenile maple. These littered the trail in massive, impassable heaps, the only way around to bushwhack deep into the chest-high ferns. Though the weather was, finally, clear and bright and the trail almost sort of dry, progress all morning was achingly slow, and by midday I was dismayed to find I’d only gone about four miles.
I was surprised by how much the area reminded me of Maine—until I remembered that state and its lush, emerald forests were less than 100 miles due east. There is a silence to the northeastern mountains that is totally unique; a quieter kind of quiet. I think maybe the moss crawling over every immobile surface swallows up the sound, or maybe the ubiquitous carpet of moose shit. Without the symphony of wind and rain that had accompanied my hike up to that point the great hush was profound, and it was this that stole me back to my last few days on the Appalachian Trail, more than the bogs, the gargantuan granite boulders, or the rich, syrupy perfume of the pines.
I met my first confirmed NOBO LT thru-hiker shortly after I’d stopped for a quick lunch on a mossy rock next to a clear, cool stream. I had hit a smooth, open, dry section of trail and had at last been able to stretch my legs for a few miles, making up some of the time I’d lost in the morning. I saw a bright yellow shirt and a shorn head and had just stepped off the trail to let this person pass when I heard her cheerfully ask, “SOBO?” Then I noticed her pack, her shoes, the permanently-dirty vibe radiating from her clothes. Another thru-hiker!
My friends on the AT and I had hiked that trail northbound, and we had a saying about just these sort of casual encounters: never trust a SOBO. Though they meant well, their information seemed always somehow out of whack—the promised water source was four miles farther on, not two, or the trail magic we’d been told to expect had somehow disappeared. I warned the NOBO hiker about the blowdowns on Belvedere, and we told each other about good lookout points not to miss. When she asked me how my hike was going, I told her how relieved I was to have had some easy hiking for a change. “Well, enjoy it!” she said, “you’ll have some smooth walking for a while!” We wished each other a good hike and continued on out separate ways.
Ten minutes later, I found myself clambering into a section of the Long Trail known as The Devil’s Gulch. This noted feature is, essentially, a pile of moss-covered boulders sandwiched between two sheer granite cliffs—like a tiny version of Mahoosuc Notch, famously the “hardest mile of the AT.” So much for smooth walking, I thought with a wry smile as I climbed and slid and scrambled across. Never trust a NOBO.
Day 4: 22 June, 15.8 miles today, 53.1 miles total, Bear Hollow Shelter, Mt. Mansfield State Forest
Days without rain: 0
I hadn’t meant to be antisocial when I arrived at the shelter, but I was so overwhelmed by mosquitoes that I raced off to set up my tent almost the moment I said hello to the small crowd of women gathered around the picnic table. Once shielded from those hungry, godless monsters I set about cleaning my feet with a small camp towel and some water. My shoes and socks had been soaked through for most of three days, and though I always changed into something dry in the evening, my toes were not handling the days of moisture well. In fact, one of them seemed to have sprouted a blister, which had burst and was now working toward becoming infected. I scrubbed the toe clean with water, then gritted my teeth and applied a drop of hand sanitizer. When the howling stinging sensation in the wound had ebbed to a dull throb, I added a drop of antimicrobial salved and carefully bandaged it up. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do.
The sky had been a perfect empty all day long, but I hadn’t even fallen asleep yet when I heard the first drops splash against my tent. It rained off and on all night, though never very heavily, despite the occasional busts of lightning and thunder. I’d planned to pack up at daybreak, hoping to make it into town reasonably early, but I thought I’d give the light shower that was falling when I awoke a chance to pass, so I lay for a while longer in my tent. My moment came, and I sprang to action, toweling the tent dry so I could pack it up without having to worry about it later. That’s when the downpour began.
My tent was soaked. My body was soaked. My poor ruined foot was soaked. I finished packing in a frustrated hurry and started on my way. Water, like all things, is lazy, and will always flow along the path of the least resistance, which in this case is more often than not the trail. The rain fell like artillery for two hours, then streamed in great currents down the rutted foot path for several more. At first, my toe felt fine, but before too long the wet sock had ripped off my meticulously wrapped bandaged, and by the time I hit the state highway leading to town, I was hobbling in the slowly emerging afternoon sun.
Johnson, VT is a tiny place. Too small for a hotel, though the owner of the local burger place lets Long Trail hikers camp in the yard behind his restaurant. I had arrived on a Sunday, however, so pretty much everything but the Dollar General was closed. I’d been looking forward to a hot meal, even if I couldn’t finagle a shower and a load of laundry. I had to settle for giving my electronics a quick charge on the deck behind the restaurant while I sorted my overpriced resupply and let my wet belongings dry in the sun. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but even so I was incredibly grateful to have gotten than much. I even rebandaged my toe—now distinctly swollen and extremely tender—and carefully threaded my battered feet into my last pair of dry socks. There was no point in hanging around this half-deserted town with several more hours of daylight left, so I shouldered my pack, meandered back up the highway, and walked back up into the woods.
Thru-hiking is a privilege. It is exhilarating, rewarding, and even sometimes fun. But it is also god damned hard. Whatever you might be struggling with, there is always more of it up ahead: more wind, more rain, more hail, more sun, more humidity, more smoke, more mud, more roots, more rocks, more snow, more ice, more ash, more sand, more climbing, more tedium, more bugs, more blisters, more exhaustion, more pain. The trail wears you down until you’re fibrous and brittle, and then it breaks you. If you have the fortitude, you can rebuild yourself stronger and more resilient, but that takes will, and it takes determination, and it takes time.
I’d started the Long Trail with the arrogance of an experienced thru-hiker taking on a comparatively short walk, and the first few days had left me humble. I thought about the moment I passed the 300-mile mark on the AT, the milestone noted alongside the trail by another hiker who’d left a large 300 in stones. I remembered standing over it in a downpour, with 300 miles of mud and pain under my already threadbare shoes, feeling like a single sheet of toilet paper, on the verge of being ripped apart or else dissolving into the rain. I had recognized that feeling this morning, when the bandage had come off my toe and my foot began screaming at me with each step. Where had that lost and sodden naïf ever found the strength to finish the entire trail? For that matter, where would I?
