Camel's Hump: September 26, 2014

Mountain: Camel's Hump
Elevation: 4,083 (Vermont's 3rd Tallest, New England's 47th Tallest)
Route: Monroe Trail
Mileage 6.2 miles Round Trip
Arya's Take: Super Fun!  I don't know why we had to stop hiking once we got to the top.  I wanted to keep going.  Dad's lame.

I'm going to get this out of the way immediately:  I might be slightly obsessed with Camel's Hump.  Maybe more than slightly obsessed.  Since I moved to Vermont, I kept eyeing it and waiting for a chance to hike it, and got my chance to do it with my younger brother in August 2013.  After that, though, I knew that I needed to hike it again.

I have my reasons behind the obsession.  First, based on where I live and where I work, I drive past Camel's Hump twice a day, and the views of it are great from the highway.  It also helps that Camel's Hump has a very distinctive profile, which has made it the subject of a lot of attention since people start writing down accounts of what would become Vermont (Seriously, even Samuel de Champlain commented on the odd-looking mountain, calling it "Le Lion Couchant", or the Couching/Resting Lion).

And it's on everything.  various logos from landscapers to bed and breakfasts to Efficiency Vermont have Camel's Hump's distinctive and not-particularly-camel-like profile smack dab on them.  The company I work for uses a view from its summit as our website banner.  It's even on the Vermont State Quarter, for crying out loud!  So *everyone* in Vermont is obsessed with this mountain.  It's not just me.

Now I'd hiked it twice in 2013 (once with my brother and once with my fiancee's brother, his wife, and their German Shepherd), and used either of the two main trails to summit it each time.  So by the time I decided to hike it with Arya, I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to approach it.  My brother and I hiked up the Monroe trail, approaching the summit from the southeast, while the second time we all hiked up the Burrows Trail, coming in from the West.  They're both about the same mileage, though the Burrows Trail goes up the north slope of the summit cone and gets absurdly steep for the last little bit.  This was a challenge for Chase the German Shepherd, as he was recovering from rotator cuff surgery at the time.  I'd actually gone this way too at the very end of the hike with my brother, too, because the Monroe Trail connects to the Alpine Trail, and the Alpine Trail is the only way to get to one of the more unusual sights on Camel's Hump, the Liberator.

In 1944, Vermont was, much like the rest of the country, in full-blow war mode, doing everything it could to support the effort in World War II.  From Coast Guard and Naval Cadets on Lake Champlain to airplane training sites, a lot of things were seen in Vermont that hadn't been seen before or since.  Which brings us to the Liberator. 

On October 16, 1944, a B-24J Liberator Bomber took off from Albany, NY on a training flight, due to stop in Burlington, VT that night before proceeding to Manchester, NH and then Chicopee, MA.

According to the reports in the Burlington Free Press, the night was unusually cold, and the pilot dropped the plane to below 4,000 at around 2:00 AM (speculation being that it would warm up the un-pressurized cabin).  However, the moon was new that night, and with the surrounding countryside under wartime black-out conditions, the pilot didn't see Camel's Hump looming in front of him until it was too late, and the plane crashed on the rocks around 100 feet below the summit itself.  The plane bounced, broke apart (the B-24 was widely despised among pilots and crew members for its tendency to, unlike the B-17 or B-29, completely disintegrate upon crashing)  and scattered people and wreckage everywhere.

Nine out of the ten crewmembers were killed in the crash, though one man (I've always heard the Ball-Turret Gunner) survived, with a broken knee.  He lay exposed on the mountain for a day and a half in sub-freezing temperatures until some locals hiked up and found him (the Army's recon plane apparently reported that the B-24 crashed on the other side of the mountain, so the official search-and-rescue operation was looking in the wrong place).  He eventually lost his hands and feet to frostbite but lived.

Now with there still being a war on, most of the plane was salvaged and recycled, and the crew given proper military burials.  However, some pieces proved too unwieldy to cart down, and remain on the mountain below the summit cone.  When my brother and hiked the Hump initially, we wanted to see the crashsite, and used the Alpine Trail to get there.Most of what remains is one of the wings, turned upside-down, exposing the wheel well for the landing gear and laticed superstructure around what I was assuming was one of the four engine nacelles.

It was an interesting thing to see, though more macabre than I was expecting it to be, since while hiking up we were thinking "Man, this is going to be so cool to see", and once we got there it became "Man, 9 people died here.  Maybe we shouldn't have come sightseeing."  I at least removed my hat, which seemed like a paltry gesture, but was something.  I digress.

Having done mostly the Monroe Trail up this time, I knew I preferred that as the route, and would want to take it all the way up, bypassing the Liberator and just getting right to the summit.  The Monroe Trailhead is down a dusty country road in the middle of Goddamnnowhere, Vermont, and I always have my doubts that my little Prius has the ground clearance to make it up there, especially after it rains.  There is actually a nice memorial to the crew of the B-24 at the parking lot, and once we got there Arya was rip-roaring to go.  The Monroe trail starts you off really well, too, with nothing too challenging to start off over the first couple of miles, as you follow a stream through the dappled forest.

I'd actually over-prepared, too, as we were hiking in late September and I'd thought that it was going to be chillier than it was (I mean, that wasn't a bad assumption to make, since the leaves had all turned and it was a brisk 43 degrees when we arrived at the trailhead).  So here I was in my trackpants, long sleeve henley and fleece vest, while I even debated putting Arya's fleece coat on her, and by the time we made it to the first trail junction (with the Dean Trail), I was a sweaty mess and had to stop to take some layers off.

This also led to my first real panic-stricken moment of Dog-Hiking, as while I was indisposed with the henley over my head, Arya spotted something in the woods (a bird or squirrel is a reasonable guess), and ripped her leash out of my hand.  I was convinced for a good couple seconds that she was gone and I'd have to explain that to my fiancee when I got home (I can't say which part I was more afraid of).  However, I was encouraged to find that she didn't bolt, and with a quick call to her (and the promise of treats) she came running back.  Though my adrenaline was sky high for a good while after that.

At any rate, once the Monroe Trail leaves the Dean Trail, you really start to gain your elevation.  Nothing too dramatic, and Arya continued her pattern on being a good 5-10 feet in front of me as we went up.  We made even better time than I did with my brother, and it felt like we were among the scrub trees near treeline in no time.  We also lucked out on the weather, and were able to get above the mountain valley fog that is so prevalent in Vermont from May to October, and were peaking out across the Champlain Valley looking towards Burlington.  And actually, once of the weirdest things that happened that day was right about when we were approaching treeline itself.

In a scene out of Jurassic Park, I felt the ground shake and some "boooooom" noises faintly made in repetition.  At first I ignored it and/or figured that I was imagining things, or that Arya had made a noise, as we were the only people on that section of trail at the time.  But then it happened again.  I kept walking and thinking about it, trying to figure it out, when it happened again.  it was officially a pattern, and officially weirding me out as to where the hell this artificial-sounding noise was coming from, since Camel's Hump is the ONLY 4,000 footer in Vermont that doesn't have a ski area somewhere on it, and so it couldn't be a chairlift or something.

Just as Arya was starting to whine about us not continuing, I figured out that the noise wasn't actually just coming through the ground, but also from the West, towards Burlington.  THEN, I remembered that Main Street in Burlington was presently undergoing maintenance off of I-89 (and MAJORLY impacting my morning/evening commutes), with jackhammers and noises with an identical rhythm to what I was hearing.  I'm convinced that all that road construction was wafting across the Champlain Valley, unobstructed, to us up on the Hump, nearly 30 miles away.  Like I said, weird.

From there, though we had only half a mile to go until the summit, and we were on top by 10:15.  The summit hike is really spectacular once you emerge from the scrub (Camel's Hump is above treeline, but only barely), as you can see clean across the Champlain Valley to the lake, Burlington, and the Adirondacks beyond, as well as up and down the Greens, to the Monroe Skyline, Mount Ellen, Sugarbush, Mad River Glen and Montpelier to the South, and Mansfield and Jay to the North.  Word is that, on a crystal-clear day (ours was alllllllmost but not quite there) you can see Mount Washington in New Hampshire to the East and Mount Royal and Montreal to the North.  Not that our view was anything but spectacular, with the inversion layer of fog looking like a vast lake in the valleys below.  The fall foliage was right around peak, too, so that was a nice bonus!

There were some fellow hikers that Arya was very interested in meeting once we got to the USGS

marker, and some park rangers that were there to make sure everyone had what they needed and stayed off the tundra grass (much to Arya's chagrin).  I sat down to have my PB+J for breakfast, gave Arya some food and water to have her calm down (which she never really did), and enjoyed my view South.  Arya really was more restless than I was expecting, having just climbed up a goddamn mountain.  She wanted to keep going, even though there was no more mountain to climb.  I had a brief thought that maybe I'd been slowly conditioning her for harder hikes so now a measly 4,083 feet wouldn't cut it (and as this was the last mountain we hiked last year stay tuned on that).  Eventually I relented and we headed back down, running into some boxers at the clearing where a hut used to be (and incidentally, where my dad got kicked off the mountain by some park rangers for trying to camp there overnight).  Arya was very excited and needed to play with both of them very badly, though one of the two of them was less included to do so.  One of the benefits of getting out so early is that you're usually one of the first people on the trail, so you're not going to be running into too many people as you ascend, but the drawback to that is that you run into EVERYONE on the way down, and it's harder to make way and wait when your knees and feet are killing you, and your dog wants to barrel ahead and lick everyone.

Arya did really well, though, and we were able to get down around 2:30 or so, which is a wonderful feeling to have most of the day left once you've hiked a mountain and your dog is tired.  Thankfully, Arya did in fact pass out on the way home, which was especially good since I had to leave her in Montpelier for a couple of hours while I drove to the Farm for a wedding (which was actually even further on in Maine, but nevermind).  I feel much better about leaving Arya on her own until Amanda comes home when I know that she'll spend the majority of it sleeping.

And here's the thing:  Hiking Camel's Hump was the last time Arya and I have been hiking, to date.  After taking a couple months to summarize where we've come from thus far, I get to transition now to the really fun part: posts about upcoming plans, figuring out when and how to hike up the remaining mountains Arya has and then writing an after-action report that's a little more fresh than what I've written thus far.  The winter was really really snow (which is awesome, since the ski season was fantastic.  Killington is, in fact, STILL OPEN), so it will most likely take another couple weeks for the summits to dry out, but I'm really thinking Arya's about to hit her stride.  More to come!

-M