One Year in Vermont: Section Hiking the Long Trail, pt. 1 (rt. 4 to Gov. Clarendon Shelter)

The Inn at Long Trail is right in the middle of this shot (that's where my car is)

So one of my goals while I’m up here is to hike all of the 272 mile Long Trail, which stretches from the Massachusetts border to Canada and inspired the creation of the Appalachian trail. I’ve already hike 100 miles of the trail, where it runs along the AT, but thought a re-hike of those sections was in order to test my mettle and to really make a claim at hiking the Long Trail. So I decided to go from rt. 4 (along the Sherburne Pass Trail- the old A.T. and L.T.) to the Clarendon Shelter, 15.7 miles away and over Killington Peak, 2400’ higher than where I was starting. The first day was fairly easy: I got a late start (10:30) because I had some housekeeping before I drove to the trailhead, but still sauntered up Killington in time for lunch. I saw a few flocks of ruffed grouse in the woods, which are roughly chicken-shaped and very noisy when disturbed.

I spent the evening at the Clarendon Shelter, dispensing some unsolicited advice to SOBOs, telling NOBOs they were halfway done, etc. I also heard sobering news: that a North-bounder had drowned two months earlier near the Pierce Pond lean-to in Maine. I still remember the place vividly. The lean-to overlooks Pierce pond and is such a beautiful spot that, on my thru-hike, I stopped at that shelter after only hiking 4 miles that day. Apparently the young man went swimming out in the pond (like a lot of hikers do), swam too close to the cold-water spring that feeds the pond, and cramped up. His friends tried to save him, but didn’t make it out in time.

I found the first day easier than I expected: I clearly lacked the cardiac efficiency or the Rob Liefeld calves of my old AT self, but I also wasn’t sore. I was thinking about hiking even further than I did (another 3.7 to the Minerva Hinchey shelter), but I’m glad I reined it in. The second day, I still wasn’t in AT shape, but now I was just as sore. What to do? I decided to take the alternate route, which thru-hikers took last year as a result of damage from Hurricane Irene, because a.) hiking the same thing twice tends to be enough for me, b.) it featured a lot of road walking, which I thought would be a little easier, and c.) views off the trail tend to be better than views on the trail. I think the alternate route was about 6 miles and added roughly 2 miles overall, but I got back on the 2012 trail before the next shelter (and in time for the climb back up Killington).

Somewhere right before Killington, I turned a corner and saw, 20 feet in front of me, what I assumed was the fattest little dog I’d ever seen. Then I thought it was a bear cub, and readied myself for a good mauling. By the time I realized that it was a porcupine, it was ambling its way through the brush. I wanted a good picture, but I remembered what happened to the Michael J. Fox dog in Homeward Bound and I was still 3 hours from a road.

Overall, it was a fun start to the Long Trail, and I was struck by the lingering effects of Hurricane
Irene. Even though it had happened almost exactly a year earlier, bridges and roads were still gone, and a lot of the hiking around rivers and creeks was through sand, which had been deposited by high waters.