Day 8: 26 June, 10.6 miles today, 96.7 miles total, Montclair Glen Lodge, Camel’s Hump State Park
Days without rain: 0
Thru-hikers on most trails detest road walking and complain loudly whenever the path their on veers into pavement—lord knows I have—but whenever the subject comes up on the Long Trail, hikers get a distant, starry look in their eyes, as if they could see a gentle paradise, where pain and struggle are only spooky legends, just out reach. South of VT Hwy 2, the LT spends a blissful couple of miles meandering along a paved road, up the trailhead for Camel’s Hump—the third highest peak in the state. There is, however, a classic Long Trail sort of twist, wherein the technical trail turns off the road for a mile or so to follow the course of the Winooski River through fields choked with chest high grass and riddled with electric fences, and through patches of overgrown brambles the rip the skin of any hiker foolish enough to leave the safety of the road to which the fucking trail eventually returns.
This detour notwithstanding, the road walk was a relief and a reprieve from the usual American Ninja Whatever Things of it all.
The long, winding climb up Camel’s Hump was only occasionally painfully steep, without any of the usual boulder walls or tree-root ladders. I was looking forward to the exposed alpine climb over the rocky hump itself, but then it started raining. It was only a light sprinkle, but the morning’s forecast for the mountain had been for no precipitation whatsoever, and it worried me to see anything falling at all. The exposed rocks of Camel’s Hump are notoriously slick and dangerous when wet, and it seemed just as likely to start pouring as it did to stop. I spent most of the climb hemming and hawing about whether to bypass the summit on the bad weather alternate—even though that trail was supposed to be nearly as treacherous in the rain—but as I neared the rocky dome the sprinkle fizzled and quit, and so I made the climb.
Camel’s Hump is one of the Long Trail’s true gems—though frequently crowded by day hikers who, in my limited experience, spend all their time on the summit complaining about the bugs.* The view at the top was still hazy from fires somewhere to the north, but the air was nonetheless much clearer. Lake Champlain stood out long and silvery blue, bordered by the pointed silhouette of the Adirondacks to the west, while out toward the east perched the fierce White Mountains of New Hampshire. Though late in the afternoon for lunch, I hunkered down on a rock and munched on a few tortillas smeared with peanut butter and spun my head, watching the neighboring peaks to either side as the formidable Green Mountains marched north to south down the center.
The descent down the south face brought home how lucky I’d been that the rain had given up the fight for the day. While the climb had been relatively smooth and even, the way down was a series of steep granite faces leading down twelve hundred feet to the notch between the Camel and Mt. Ethan Allen. It was exhausting to clamber down boulder after boulder after boulder—if it had been wet, though, fatigue would have been the least of my worries.
*which aren’t even bad by LT standards—most of the ones on Camel’s Hump don’t even bite
Day 9: 27 June, 10.2 miles today, 106.9 miles total, Addison, VT
Days without rain: 1
I was on a lucky streak—yesterday’s rain hadn’t amounted to much and the truly gnarly descent off of Camel’s Hump went as well as it could for any middle-aged hiker with stiff and crispy knees. Much of the talk in the shelter that evening, led by two extremely garrulous NOBOs, was of the peak they’d just crossed and which lay waiting in the morning for me and the only other SOBO I’d met on trail, who came wandering into camp shortly before dusk. Burnt Rock Mountain was, for some reason, legendarily difficult in the rain, though when I saw it in person it seemed as if I couldn’t possibly be any worse than the other exposed, rocky climbs I’d already seen. And on a dry and sunny day like this, it was actually quite fun—a just tuck your poles in your pack and let ‘er rip kind of mountain. And the view was clearer than ever, making me wonder if the smoke in the air wasn’t actually starting to clear.
After getting up and over that obstacle course I took a look at the map, going over the day’s remaining miles. Burnt Rock hadn’t been dangerous or scary, but it had been slow. It was already midday and I’d covered just over four hours. I was looking to meet my cousin at Appalachian Gap that afternoon, but from the look of the elevation profile I shouldn’t have any issues getting there in reasonable time.
Almost a week and a half on the Long Trail, and I hadn’t learned a thing. The flat stretch of trail between Burnt Rock and the flat cliff-top ledge known as Molly Stark’s Balcony* was peppered with sudden drops into small, rock-laden ravines, trees with elaborate exposed roots to climb up, and mud. And the climb up the balcony itself was the sort of hand-over-hand technical work that the trail always seemed to hit me with by surprise. The descent to App Gap felt like a straight drop, 500’ down through exposed rock and mud slickened with water from god knows where. Down hiking was an exercise in rock hopping, each step a drop in several feet, until I thought my joints might slam apart before I’d made it to the trailhead. And then, just like that, it was over, and the forest spit me right out onto road, where I could see my cousin’s wind-blown silhouette in the pull-off, staring off across the mountains as they rolled away into the distance.
*among the most New Englandy of names for natural features I could ever have imagined
Day 10: 28 June, 9.3 miles today, 116.2 miles total, Battell Shelter, Green Mountain National Forest
Days without rain: 0
It was nice to have a break from the world of the trail—even a visit to a trail town is such an intrinsic part of thru-hiking that it feels only like a different a chapter in the same book. But having just a night to be solidly inside another part of your life is truly refreshing, like setting down the tome you’ve been working your way through in favor of an evening with an old favorite. Not that the trail was ever far from anyone’s mind; catching up with my cousin, we swapped stories from our respective times on the AT, and while looking over the stretch of the LT that awaited me in the morning, her husband informed me that he remembered it being “challenging.”
The house was bursting with chaotic energy, as the two grownups and their two children prepared to leave in the morning on a two-week family vacation—but as my cousin and I left in the morning to drop me off at the trailhead, I was well-fed, clean, laundered, and happy to have been able to catch a moment with a branch of the family I rarely got to see. The weather at the road crossing was ominous, the wind whipping the stunted pines on either side of the gap as a dark, threatening cloud built toward the east. Whatever the weather, it was time to start hiking. I gave my cousin a hug and walked back into the forest.
I think that calling the section of the LT between Lincoln Gap and Appalachian gap challenging is a fair assessment—at least objectively. I, however, was not an objective observer. I was a SOBO Long Trail hiker, and my perspective had been substantially bent by the northernmost hundred miles of the trail. Here were the same boulder scrambles I’d had to contend with over and over again each day, but far fewer of them, and even these had iron rungs drilled into the rock for support. It was the Long Trail Lite, suggesting the contours of the full-calorie version, but without the same punch to the gut.
Not that I was exactly flying over this sleeker, smoother footpath. The deep sleep I’d fallen immediately into on the pull-out bed had not made for the massive sleep debt I’d been carrying most of the trail, and where I had hustled to zip through yesterday’s obstacle course, now I was dragging ass through the most forgiving stretch of trail I’d encountered. The weather wasn’t motivating—once I’d climbed up the ridgeline, everything was completely socked in, though thankfully it only actually rained for a dispiriting but brief 20 minutes. The sub-alpine forest was a haunted house, the walls of thin, dead firs papered over with layers of moss and swallowed by the cold mist. Very pretty, in its own way.
I met a ridge runner at one of the ski-patrol shelters on one of the peaks along the way, who came out of the building just as I was cinching up my knee supports to get started again after a taking a snack break on the bench outside. While chatting, she told me that a lot of NOBOs report this very section as being the most difficult of the entire trail, which surprised me. “It could be,” she speculated, “that they remember it that way because for them it’s the first time the trail’s been this hard, and that’s what sticks in their mind.” It seemed a reasonable theory, but my mind was too distracted to focus much on it. The first time the trail’s been this hard. Did that mean that the trail was about to get easier? Had I come to the dividing line, already? Had I actually survived the Long Trail’s notorious northern reaches?
My head spun with the possibilities as I wandered through the clouds in a daze, walking slowly as the trail wandered gently up and down the meandering ridgeline, before cascading sharply down an endless pile of precariously balanced rock—possibly for the last time*—toward camp.
*Spoiler: nope.
Day 11: 29 June, 14.4 miles today, 130.6 miles total, Skyline Lodge, Breadloaf Wilderness, Green Mountain National Forest
Days without rain: 1
“What are you doing here?” The question wasn’t asked maliciously, but with curiosity and genuine interest. I’d been at a shelter a few evenings back with two NOBOs, one SOBO, and an overnighter. One of the northbounders, a kid in his early 20s who was attempting to complete the entire Long Trail without stopping to resupply,* had asked me where I was from, and had been astounded to hear that I’d come all the way from North Carolina. I assumed what he’d intended to ask me was where I was from in Vermont, since literally everyone I’d talked to had been local to that state. It had struck me as odd: I’d known several people who’d hiked this trail in the past, and not one of them had been a Vermonter. Now, not only did I seem to be the only non-native thru-hiker, but all the locals always seemed surprised that an outsider had somehow discovered their trail—this despite the fact that 40% of the thing was also a section of the Appalachian Trail, a footpath so renowned that it drew hikers from all over the world.
Now, as I was taking leave of another shelter, another Vermonter—a dairy farmer from the south of the state who was for the weekend to backpack a stretch of the Green Mountain National Forest with his surly teenaged boys—seemed just as incredulous that I’d traveled such an impossible distance to hike such a well-kept secret of a trail. “Wow,” he said, “you’ve come a long way.” He was friendly, hopeful to talk with another grownup, or at least one that shared his interest in backpacking. I was happy to chit chat for a couple of minutes, my pack only back, hip-belt secured, and trekking poles in hand, but when he started talking excitedly about the shoes I was wearing I felt like it was time for me to take my leave. I had miles to make, after all.
It was only a few miles to Lincoln Gap, but despite the still-early hour I passed a steady stream of day hikers headed up to the peaks I’d traversed the afternoon before. Traffic died down, however, the moment I crossed Lincoln Gap and entered the absurdly-named Breadloaf Wilderness. It was fairly easy to see why: while the section to the north lead to a series of peaks with views ranging from great to fine, the Breadloaf section of the LT climbed up to a wooded ridge, only the very occasional break in the trees offering anything resembling a view. That was fine with me—I was happy the more forgiving terrain, though in order to keep this stretch of trail spicy the Forest Service had elected not to maintain it. Blowdowns from 20 years ago lay prone under more recently felled pines, and some lengths of trail were so overgrown they could hardly have been said to have been there at all.
The clambering and bushwhacking slowed me down a fair bit, but I was too pleased with the rolling countryside to let it bother me too too much. The forest was a quiet, uncut gem, an emerald maze with innumerable facets twinkling at me from all sides. The air was cool, my clothes mostly dry, my balls freshly powdered with the gold bond is picked up when I was in town. There was a fine day to be had in this lonely forest—all I had to do was hike it.
*This is to say, he had started the trail carrying 50lbs of food, a little over half of which he’d eaten thus far. He also had, apparently, 5 physical, actual books tucked into his pack, along with god knows what else. He was fit, young, and clearly fast, but it did not escape my notice when he later complained that his knees had been bothering him—though nobody at the time commented on the matter.
Day 12: 30 June, 17.3 miles today, 147.9 miles total, Sunrise Shelter, Green Mountain National Forest
Days without rain: 2
Though given the plush-sounding name Skyline Lodge, the building was no more than a rustic cabin overlooking a backcountry pond—which was all any of the three of us camped there that night needed or wanted. The other SOBO was a man I’d camped with several times already. The only other southbounder I’d met, we were keeping pace with one another, though we almost never saw one another during the day. The cabin’s other resident was an excited young NOBO, whose claim that the day he’d just finished was “the hardest trail I’ve ever seen” gave me hope that finishing this walk might yet be possible.
All three of us were dead asleep when the sun breached the eastern horizon, lit up the pond like a bonfire, and came pouring through the windows in a burst of intense light and maybe—just maybe—the faintest hint of a heavenly choir singing hallelujah. I sat up and looked at the morning, marveling at its perfect beauty. Then I looked down at my watch, marveling that it was barely past five. The angels above may have been heralding the morn, but I pulled my sleeping bag up over my face and went back to sleep for another hour.
The signs posted at both entrances to both the Breadloaf Wilderness Area, as well as the Battell Wilderness Area to its south, read:
Wilderness is managed [sic] to provide primitive recreation opportunities and to allow natural forces to direct the character of the land. Be prepared to meet increased challenges on this and other Wilderness trails.
…which sounds lofty but rings hollow. There is, first of all, ample evidence that these sections of the Long Trail used to be actively managed, before nature was allowed to start reclaiming it a few years ago.* Second, it is to avoid exactly the sort of destructive network of social trails trammeling the delicate subalpine vegetation that have since sprung up around every unmitigated blowdown in this region that wilderness trails are built (and maintained) in the first place. My suspicion is that the US Forest Service, which seems to be responsible for the LT as it ambles through its lands, lost the funding to keep the trail clear of brush, blowdowns, and other obstructions several years ago, and came up with the business about primitive recreation to put a good face on it.
I wasn’t buying it, and the longer I spent getting slapped in the face by tree limbs and belly crawling under rotten logs, the more desperate I became to get through all this nonsense and come out the other side. It was a Catch-22, of course, as it was precisely these increased challenges that were slowing me down and keeping me from reaching the wilderness area’s southern border. Somewhere in that wild mess, I passed the trail’s halfway point and didn’t notice—a milestone buried under mud, fallen trees, and stinging nettles.
When I finally broke free of the Battell Wilderness, late in the afternoon, it was with the relief of sliding into a hot bath after a cold and brutal day. The trail across Brandon Gap was the gentlest I had yet seen. The path was wide, empty of rocks and roots, migrating upward at an easy, relaxed grade. I walked with my trekking poles held loosely in one hand at my side—which is common for me on most trails, but which I had never managed on this one until now. Those last two and a half miles were a celebration, a glory march marking the end of the ruthless, barbarous north. That trail practically carried me to camp, drifting ever upward among the lofty pines on gossamer wings of hope.
*Or to start directing its character, if you prefer.
Day 13: 1 July, 18.3 miles today, 166.2 miles total, Rutland, VT
Days without rain: 0
But it was a far more insidious set of delicate, diaphanous wings that would come to define the night.
The Sunrise Shelter—so named because of its placement within the property of an eponymous ski resort, the deeply forested surroundings making any view of the early morning sun theoretical at best—is a palatial cabin with four walls and a host of windows which admit a flood of natural light. The only thing it doesn’t have is a door, the framed 6’x8’ hole in the front of the building distracting from the overall picture, like a perfectly coiffured male model in a $10,000 suit missing his front teeth.
At first, this didn’t seem like it would be a problem. The Other SOBO* and I sat on the porch eating our dinners, and the only trouble we had was an ant that kept trying to crawl into my food bag. After we had retreated to our sleeping bags, settled on bunks on opposite sides of the cavernous interior, I noticed a single mosquito weaving drunkenly through the space above my head. I was unable to swat it, so I decided to ignore it. This worked for a while, but eventually that mosquito was joined by another. When the third appeared, it occurred to me that I’d better dig my headnet out of my bag.
The Other SOBO had the same idea, though he had a mesh bivvy which, when tied to beams in the ceiling, gave him full-body protection. All I had was a mesh sack slightly bigger than my head, which required me to sleep with my ballcap on so the brim would hold the net far enough from my face to deny the mosquitoes access. To prevent them from getting to the rest of me, I had to keep my sleeping bag cinched tight around my neck—throughout the still, muggy night.
As darkness consumed the cabin, the trickle of mosquitoes became a flood. There were hundreds of them, a swarm that generated a loud, constant tone, that immensely irritating buzz only a mosquito can make, that whine that sounds the way its bite feels:
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
The scene was like something from a cheap 1960’s horror movie, something with a name like The Cabin that Sucked Blood. Any time I moved, a few slipped inside my sleeping bag, so I tried to lay as still as I could, but I was sweaty and uncomfortable. I lay under siege until the wee hours of the morning, when all but a few stragglers left the shelter. I don’t know why, unless they’d already gotten their fill from me, but once I realized they’d left, I pulled the sleeping bag down and fell asleep the moment the cool night air touched my fevered skin.
I’d pinged a weather report from my satellite communications device the evening before, so the rain in the morning wasn’t a surprise. But it still sucked. 20 minutes into what I already knew was going to be a long day and I was soaked head to foot, my dipping shorts riding up my crotch in strange and uncomfortable ways. The forest was thick with fog and the trail muddy and slick. The beautiful tread from the day before had lasted only as far as the shelter, and now the path was windy and uneven, overgrown with ferns and wayward young maples but also an endless prickling sea of stinging nettles. These were the final miles of the Long Trail as an independent concern, and it was determined to get its last licks in before joining the Appalachian Trail at Maine Junction.
There were the nettles, and then there were the blowdowns—gigantic trunks that had fallen across the trail as it traversed a steep side slope for several agonizing miles. Every one of these required meticulous planning and a bit of luck to cross safely without sliding down the mountain, and I found my patience starting to wear thin. I had hoped to make it all the way into town if the conditions had been good, but now I was determined to get there specifically because they weren’t. No day this monumentally unpleasant should end without a thick juicy burger and tall glass of beer.
It was an absolute slog, even as the rain finally cleared and the sun fought its way through the odd break in the clouds. I refused to stop any longer than it took me to dig my last couple of protein bars from the bottom of my food bag, but plowed on until my sodden feet were beat raw. And then I saw a small clearing ahead in the woods, an opening bathed in a pool of golden sunlight. It was a four-way intersection, each branch marked by its own wooden sign: Long Trail North, Appalachian Trail North, Long Trail/Appalachian Trail South, and a clear, unambiguous pathway through the underbrush just past a signed which read in large block letters THIS IS NOT A TRAIL.
For the remainder of the way through the state of Vermont, the Long Trail would share its footbed with the Appalachian Trail. From this point until the end of my hike, I would be retreading the same path if walked on my first thru-hike in 2017, though in the opposite direction. This is what the miles of rough and damaging trail had been leading to. After several years and so many thousands of miles, I had come home.
*Still the only other southbounder I’d met on the Long Trail