Narrative of a woman who hikes over a thousand wilderness miles along the spine of the rugged and beautiful Green Mountains of Vermont.
Excerpt
Once in a while you happen upon a place where out of the blue you feel a peculiar sense of belonging. It’s a place that somehow mystifies you, a place that keeps calling you back. My friend Rich says you know when you’ve found such a place because your feet will stop itching. Rich was right, The 270-mile Long Trail in Vermont became one of these places in my life. At home, after an initial scattering of hikes on the Long Trail, my feet indeed began to “itch.” I was caught unawares. While I ironed clothes, I found myself walking amidst the velvety balsams on Glastenbury Mountain. A tall, cold glass of water became the trickle that clenched my thirst at a spring run-off. The stars seen from my bedroom window in the dead of a black night were the stars I saw from my tiny tent nestled deep in the woods. To my astonishment, this trail did more than call me back-”it grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go.
In the beginning I fell in love with the idea of hiking the Long Trail, never having actually been on it. The closest I probably came was cruising over it in Jonesville on Interstate 89 on the way to Burlington from my home in New Hampshire. My first real glimpse of the trail was on a Vermont state map that I had picked up at a highway rest stop. I noticed a central, red-dotted line running vertically along the entire length of the map and was greatly intrigued. Later I acquired the Green Mountain Club’s Long Trail Guide and, upon seeing the detailed topographic maps, quickly became obsessed with this intriguing, continuous footpath that spanned from one end of Vermont to the other.
I had always been a woodswalker, but it wasn’t until I was in my 30′s that I started getting into backpacking-”meaning lugging some degree of home sweet home on one’s back for days or weeks at a stretch. During that time I was absorbed in a fledging homestead venture and still tangled up in parenthood, so my hiking pursuits had primarily been in the area of New Hampshire’s Cardigan Mountain which sweeps up directly behind my cabin. Being just a “country mile” from the Connecticut River-”our threshold to Vermont-” I figured the Long Trail could expand my tramping horizons nicely.
One morning in early spring after the root crops were planted, I bushwhacked from my cabin up to Mount Cardigan, followed by my four-year-old boy and his dog Sparky. Atop the granite summit of Old Baldy (as she is fondly known), I combed out the mountains to the northwest with a pair of binoculars. On this clear, cold morning I located Camel’s Hump, its discernable summit peeking out amidst the many mountain ranges that lay between us.
“That there is Camel’s Hump,” I said to my son, who was swinging himself around one of the metal legs of the fire tower that is perched on Cardigan.
The youngster, now interrupted from the dream state of his whimsical whirling, stopped himself. “What’s over there, Mom?”
I poured a cup of coffee from my Thermos. “The Long Trail,” I replied. The steam from the piping hot coffee spiraled into the air and momentarily clouded my face as I took a sip. “We’re going to hike the Long Trail.”
“OK, Mom,” the youngster replied, having no idea what I was talking about, and then went back to swinging himself in circles.
Since that chilly morning atop Mount Cardigan, I have put over a thousand Green Mountain miles under my belt, or should I say, under the soles of several pairs of worn-out hiking boots. In 1991 I began an end-to-end hike of the Long Trail with the four-year-old and his dog; sporadically bouncing all over the map with whatever scarce and precious time afforded us. I was promptly stunned by the austerity and isolation of parts of the trail and how the weather in the Green Mountains could quickly become unforgiving. To me, a footpath had been defined as a manicured walkway. There were sections of the Long Trail that cured me of that perception damn fast. But despite the blood, sweat, and tears that were sometimes required by the trail, I could not stay away. I had caught a permanent case of “white blaze fever,” a term coined for those souls who become possessed by following the 2 x 6-inch paint splotches that embellish the trails and keep you on track. There is no cure for the fever.
My son and I hiked under the trail names of Woodswoman and Gnatcatcher. Once home from these early, brief expeditions, I recorded every step in my journal and anxiously planned the next escapement. Even though sometimes it felt like more driving than hiking, I was hooked. For years it seemed my existence was a balancing act between backpacking and homesteading. Both drew me like a magnet and the priorities of each collided constantly. Because we did quite a few overlaps due to travel time constraints, the first, official completion of the Long Trail would span seven years.
Five years into the boy’s and my venture, I had a brainstorm that involved the better portion of my siblings: five sisters committing to a few days each year to hike the entirety of the Long Trail beginning at the southern terminus. To my delight, my four younger sisters took to the white blazes like flies to a cold hamburger. They adopted the trail names of (youngest to oldest) Boonie, Two-Cuppa, Buffie, and Trailblazer. The two end-to-end hikes overlapped for a couple of years, thus the boy and I would revel in the gusty winds atop Jay Peak as we got closer to Canada, and a few weeks later I would be soaking in the views with the sisters atop the Glastenbury fire tower.
Shortly after the millennium’s passing, I had my own, personal Y2K event. It started with a newly-published book titled Forest Under My Fingernails. The author, Walter McLaughlin, had written a comprehensive and wonderfully woodsy account of his thru-hike of the Long Trail. Wow, a thru-hike! Jeesh, would I love to… No, impossible. The gardens, the fruit tree schedules, the appointments, the bills- On top of all that, what kid is going to want to spend a month in the woods with his mother? No, the complete one-month abandonment of farm and family would be impossible.
But the obsession to walk the entire length of the Green Mountain State in one shot wouldn’t lose its grip. After watching Lynne Wheldon’s video, 27 Days, about a Long Trail thru-hike undertaken by four senior backpackers, I was completely seized. During the height of a very productive garden and orchard season, I abandoned it all, threw three packs together, and hit the Long Trail for a solid month with a budding teenager and his dog. (Yep, if the mutt was going to bark the bark, he was going to walk the walk with packs also.) This month-long journey through the woods with my son was a phenomenal experience.
Four years after the 2000 thru-hike, parenting had loosened its grip. I had steadily regained a good degree of my independence, and this recaptured freedom was a delight. No empty nest syndrome here. I had turned 50 and my priorities were shifting fast. It was time to welcome what the last 800 or so miles in the Vermont woods had physically and mentally prepared me for: a solo hike of the Long Trail.
This book is the culmination of all those separate walks. I had a choice of sequencing it chronologically or starting at the southern terminus and following the trail successively to the Canadian border. I decided that as a sketch of the Long Trail, it made the most sense to adopt the latter approach. Each chapter is written from the point of view of when that particular hike was taken. Each chapter is therefore not only a description of that segment of the Long Trail, but is also a snapshot in time of my fruition as a hiker and a person. Throughout the narrative of this incredible “footpath in the wilderness,” the reader can chuckle at my naive beginnings and possibly appreciate not so much how much wisdom I gained by the end, but how hard earned whatever I gained was.
At home, collecting books is my mania and reading them is my entertainment. When I wasn’t actually on the trail, I found that I got a tremendous amount of enjoyment collecting and reading books about the Long Trail and the history of the Green Mountains. As I began writing my account of the Long Trail, I couldn’t resist throwing in snippets from my reading. I hope you will enjoy this sprinkling of lore and the accounts of trail blazers and woods trampers from days long past.
Thanks for sharing my journey.
Read more about Scraped Knees and Mac N’ Cheese, One Woman’s Journey of a Thousand Miles on the Vermont Long Trail and Sandi Pierson HERE.
Copyright 2010 Sandi Pierson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Post a Comment