Mount Ellen: June 14, 2015

Mountain: Mount Ellen
Elevation: 4,083 (Vermont's 3rd Tallest, New England's 47th Tallest)
Route: Jerusalem Trail/Long Trail
Mileage 8.4 miles Round Trip
Arya's Take: WHAT IS THIS ABOMINATION ON MY BACK


So spoiler alert, just like I said I probably would in the last post, Arya and I ended up doing Mount Ellen over the weekend, since it was closest to our new house (in Barre!) and wouldn't take up the full day.  My fiancee wanted to head into Burlington to do some furniture shopping and to swing my Lowe's (our lives are rapidly becoming some kind of home-improvement commercial), so we couldn't spend all day up in the mountains.  Though given how my knee ended up, that wouldn't have been advisable anyway.


We took the same trail I did a couple years ago, the Jerusalem Trail, which was a nice little test of my memory to see if I could get back to it since it's off to the side of a dusty country road up and over the Appalachian Gap.  To my semi-astonishment I was not only able to get myself out of bed at 5:15 on a Sunday, but we made it there no problem, and were on the trail by 7:30.  We weren't even the first car at the trailhead!


The morning was foggy, as was expected in the valleys of Vermont in the summer, and as we started up, I tried to find as many landmarks as I could so I could look for them on the descent to know how much trail we had left.  Arya also took the time to get used to the newest addition to my (or, our) hiking equipment, a dog backpack for her.  My old dog growing up had one, and it's great for two reasons:  they can carry their own damn food and water, and the added weight helps slow them down a bit, so they're not running all over the place.  Which is especially nice for Arya, since she's not off-leash ready and I'd prefer not to run through the woods after her.

She adapted eventually, but there was a learning curve for both of us starting out.  First, She reacted pretty much as you'd expect having an additional several pounds strapped to her back.  Trying to chew the saddlebags, running around to try and escape it, et cetera.  Once she settled in, though, I realized I'd done an exceptionally poor job of distributing the weight throughout the two bags, with her food (light) in one, and her quart and a half of water (heavy) in the other.  Eventually I swapped out the large water bottle for the two 32-oz Nalgenes I had in my pack, and that seemed to work better.  Her shoulder harness fit nicely underneath it, too, so after the first few minutes, she didn't even react to it anymore.

However, as we climbed, Arya started giving me a healthy dose of paranoia, as she acted out of character by repeatedly turning around and staring down the trail, as if someone (or something) was following us.  She even sat down a couple times and I had to coax her along.  This was especially unnerving to me, as we were the first ones on the trail that morning (we found out later on that the other car in the parking lot belonged to someone who was camping overnight) and I'm convinced that one of these days hiking alone I'll run into a bear or mountain lion or something that will eat me.  Also there are two convicted murderers that just escaped a prison in upstate New York and the authorities have widened the net to Vermont, so there's that.

Anyway, the first part of the Jerusalem Trail is actually on private property, and is actually used for servicing maple tap lines.  They string throughout the woods, with the trail being really more of an ATV track at first and we actually passed the Sugarbush itself.  Really impresses on you how many trees and how much sap are needed to viably make syrup. 

Eventually the Jerusalem Trail begins to rise and leaves the sap lines behind, following a brook up to the top of the Monroe Skyline.  This was nice for Arya, since she prefers to drink streamwater over water in bottles.  Well, she kind of eats the streamwater actually, biting it and bearing her teeth at it before barking at it and running away.  My dog is...odd.

I also had to remark on how incredibly soggy the woods still are, which I guess is to be expected given how much snow we got over the winter, but still.  In places the trail was actually more of a stream itself, and with all of the mud, it didn't take long for Arya's white front left paw to disappear (I hastily remembered that I had a towel in my car, thank God).  There were even a couple times when we came across a flooded section of trail and had to try and find the best way to navigate it without losing a boot.  It's one of the advantages of hiking with a dog I wasn't really expecting:  Arya's really good at finding the quickest route on solid ground (or which rocks aren't loose and are good to step on).  The clouds began to burn off as we neared the top of the ridge, and I did my patented "where the hell is that trail junction?!" mere feet from arriving at the trail junction.

From the top of the Skyline, we turned right for the 1.8 miles of ridgewalking to get to Mount Ellen.  We also encountered our first fellow hikers of the day, though since it was 9:00 and we were miles and miles from any other trailheads, I had to wonder where they had spent the night.  I always enjoy running into other people on the trail (though Arya's reception of them is rather hit-or-miss), since everyone you meet, especially when you get as remote as we were, wants to be there and is generally in a pretty good mood.  The major exception is kids, as you'd expect, but even they generally are having fun.

By the time we'd gotten to the top of the Summit Triple chairlift, I'd drank most of the water in one of the Nalgenes Arya was carrying and we had to redistribute things a bit before continuing, as she started to list a bit.  She didn't quite know what to make of the ski trail when we emerged onto what I now know is the top of Rim Run, a nice jaunty blue square (I hadn't skied at Mount Ellen when I hiked it last time, now that I have it's weird to see all the familiar trails without snow).  She seemed to like the space, I guess?  but it was confusing to her as well, as she didn't know which way we were supposed to go.  I took some pictures on the lift and generally wandered around for a bit, since once we went back into the woods, we'd run into the same problem that I'd had last time, ie, not being able to find the goddamn summit.

It turns out, however, that the summit itself is even closer to the lift than I thought it was.  Which makes sense, as when I'd been skiing there over the winter, there was a sign into the woods and I'd seen several people taking off their skis and tromping off.  At the time I thought it was really odd, since having hiked to what I thought was the summit over half a mile, it seemed like a terrible idea to do that in ski boots.  It turns out that someone had constructed a cairn on the summit of Ellen, with a ski pole attached to it, and the summit is like 200 yards from the ski trails.  You could almost still see the chairlift when we got there.

So after I felt like an idiot for hiking THAT MUCH FARTHER than I needed to when I climbed Ellen the first time, I broke out the dog food from Arya's backpack and a soggy PB&J from my own for lunch.  Well, more breakfast than lunch, since the side effect of me needing to be on the trail at the crack of dawn meant that we reached the summit at 10:05.  Good time, and it meant that I'd be able to go furniture shopping with time to spare, though part of me thinks I could have coordinated that a bit better.  Also it occurred to me that with a little more foresight, I might have been able to do both Ellen and Abraham and grab two peaks for Arya (since Abraham is a couple miles south on the Monroe Skyline from Ellen), but I digress.

Arya started whining as soon as she finished her food, and kept clamoring to keep moving the whole time I ate.  I really need to work with her on that, I think, since the times we've spent on summits has been primarily spent trying to sit and eat for two goddamn seconds while she wants to either explore, or start down the trail again.  We did some sit-waits and some down-waits (practicing the length of time before she was allowed to get the treat I laid out for her), but that was disrupted by some other hikers and I decided to cut my losses and head back down.  Mount Ellen is completely wooded on top anyway, so it's not like there were any views I needed to take in, apart from the ones on the ski slope.

As you might know from other entries, I kind of hate the descent.  First, all the exhilaration of summiting the mountain is over, and all you have left is the long slog back to the car.  This is especially bad when you're below treeline (which we were) and you're on a deadline anyway to get home, and you'd prefer to just get there already.  This is the main reason that I tried to memorize the landmarks from earlier, so I could know how close to quitting time we were

The other major problem we ran into distresses me more than somewhat, as we were juuuuuust making the transition from coniferous to deciduous trees, my right knee started acting up.  Have I mentioned my right knee?  I can't remember if I've gone through exactly why I have to wear my brace on the Blawg before, but anyway, my knee.  I injured it going on 5 years ago, whilst playing hockey.  I went to turn up the ice without knowing that my skate blade was caught in a divot.  My upper leg turned, my lower leg didn't, and I collapsed.  I actually had the good sense to call it a day and go home immediately (which I kind of had to do since I could hardly walk), and for treatment I went with the tried and true method of ignoring it until it went away.

Flash forward to now, and the right side of my right knee absolutely kills me whenever I walk for extended periods.  This is kind of an obstacle to the "Hike with my dog" plan, and I actually went and got an MRI on it last spring to finally see what the hell was going on, and what I could do about it.  Turns out that my right ACL is sprained, and my orthopedist says it's bad enough to need a brace, but slight enough to not really justify surgery.  So hence, the metal-reinforced brace.

This is why I'm nervous that my right knee started giving me problems on the way down Ellen.  I'd hiked all last summer with nary a problem, but even using my hiking pole as a crutch, I had to stop several times to wince and catch my breath, apologizing to Arya for being a slow poke.  It's been two days and I'm still walking funny, and this was only a hike of 8.4 miles, none of which was particularly steep or challenging.  It does not bode well for the more ambitious hikes I want to go on in the next couple months, but I suppose that I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.  Besides, going up is fine.  It's just coming down when it hurts.

Well, even if it took a bit longer than anticipated, we did make it down to the car at about 12:30, and we were back to Barre by 1:00.  Arya took the opportunity to pass out on the ride home (and incidentally, didn't make much of a fuss when we left for Burlington later in the afternoon).  I got to add another peak under her name on the big board, and we can officially call Hiking Season 2015 open.

-M