Hi All!
So now we've reached a new kind of post: where I look at the summer and start plotting out potential trips to go on, since it's June, Killington is finally closed and my skis are dwelling in the basement next to my hockey bag and cricket bats. So what's on the docket?
Arya's already done two of the 5 Vermont 4,000 footers, and the only one we have left together is Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest. However, some of our friends have expressed interest in doing Mansfield with us, and I don't want to start off the summer with one of the highest and possibly most challenging hikes, so I think a warmup is in order. But even with a warmup, there are peaks to be bagged for Arya, and so that means a bit of a retread for me. Which is fine, really, since it'll be nice to know exactly what I'm getting us into and what to expect. So that leaves us with two real options, until Arya and I re-hike Camel's Hump (don't fool yourself, we're *definitely* re-hiking Camel's Hump this summer). And both of those options are really right next to each other, on a part of the Long Trail called the Monroe Skyline. Which sounds weird to me, but maybe I've just been playing too much Bioshock Infinite recently.
The two mountains are on the low end of Vermont's 4,000 footers, Mounts Abraham and Ellen. Abraham is actually the shortest of the bunch, barely registering at 4,004. I hiked it a few years ago with a friend of mine from college; we were actually up at Middlebury for our 5-year college reunion and were looking for something to do during the day when there wasn't a whole lot of interesting stuff offered on campus. I hadn't been planning on hiking that weekend at all until he suggested it, and having not heard of the mountain before, I actually didn't know it was an official 4,000 footer until we got to the top, emerging from treeline eeeeever so slightly, and I saw the USGS capstone.
Abraham also bodes well for a warmup for a couple of reasons beyond its relative low profile. Having not planned on hiking, I hadn't packed any suitable clothes or boots for reunion, and I hiked it with my friend whilst wearing sneakers. Granted my feet weren't in super great shape when we finished and I wouldn't recommend it, but it's not like my feet were bleeding, and we were able to get out, get up, get down, and get back to Middlebury in time for the class dinners that evening. It's nothing that Arya couldn't handle.
Now the problematic thing is, there are two main trails to take up Abraham and I have no idea which one my friend and I used. Complicating matters is the fact that they're both listed as being rather moderate/strenuous according my my guidebooks, and that doesn't really mesh with what i remember. Both are around 5 miles round trip, so I guess it doesn't matter which one we take, but I'd like to maximize our time and not pick the one that will keep us up there all day, since unfortunately we'll be driving for a little bit from Montpelier to get to the trailhead.
The other mountain on the Monroe Skyline that we could use as a start is Mount Ellen, which I climbed in August of 2013 once I got the hiking bug back. It was really a lark, and it's what actually got me back into this whole mode, since I had a fantastic time hiking by myself and remembered all the things that I love about hiking that I'd been missing since I stopped doing it a decade ago.
Mount Ellen is, unfortunately, one of the main peaks of the Sugarbush Ski Resort, and the summit is a stone's throw from a triple chairlift. You even have to traverse up a base ski slope for a couple hundred yards to get to the point where the trail to the summit slips back into the woods, which is a bit odd.
The other thing that I really want to harp on with Mount Ellen really isn't about the mountain per se, but with the Green Mountain Club. See, having grown up hiking in the White Mountains, with most trails kept up and maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club, I came to expect a certain level of specificity and clarity when it came to trail junctions and signage. See, in the White Mountains, each trail junction is marked with clear signs for where each trail goes (sometimes there are rather a lot of them at once, especially in the Presidentials). Mileage is included, so you know how far you have to go to get to either the next junction, or the summit of the mountain you're on, and the White Mountain Guide that the AMC puts out (and continually updates every few years) builds on those signs and has detailed descriptions of each and every trail with landmarks to keep an eye out for.
The Green Mountain Club, to put it bluntly, does not do this. They have a couple of guidebooks I picked up (the very fact that I had to buy more than one book to cover the hiking trails in Vermont was its own frustration) but the detail of the trail descriptions varies wildly, depending on how close or how important the trail is to the Long Trail, which is the GMC's crown jewel.
I don't know if I've specifically mentioned the Long Trail on the Blawg before? Basically, it's 270-or-so mile trail tharuns the length of Vermont, from Massachusetts to Quebec. It hits all of the major peaks, since they're all on the same spine anyway, and it's a popular destination for those looking for some endurance overnight hiking but aren't sure they're insane enough to try the Appalachian Trail yet. It's a neat thing to have, and I've thought about giving it a go before I get too old, but the problem with its central importance to the GMC is that everything else suffers at its expense.
The signs on the Long Trail are impeccable, showing you exactly where you are and how far you need to go to the next trail, peak, or gap (notches in Vermont are called gaps. For some reason). The whole trail is marked with clear white blazes, so it's basically impossible to get lost. But it IS very possible to go too far. I ran into this when I did Ellen, because once the Jerusalem Trail puts you on top of the Monroe Skyline ridge, you know how far you have to go to get to the peak of Ellen, but what it doesn't tell you is that there's a spur you need to take to get there.
In the Whites, this spur would be noted in the guidebook, and there would be a very clear wooden sign noting that the Mount Ellen Summit Spur is here, and it's 0.1 or whatever to the summit itself. In the GMC book, though, while it does tell you it's 1.8 miles to the summit of Ellen, no mention of the spur is in there at all, and I ended up going PAST it for about a half mile before I started descending and realized something was up. For the GMC, the Long Trail is the attraction, and the fact that there are some mountains on it is an afterthought.
Anyway, there are some nice views up Ellen, and it is dramatically closer to home for me, so I'll probably end up doing that with Arya in the next couple weeks. Maybe even this weekend, if the weather holds. After that? Well, there's still Abraham and Mansfield to have her do, and then there's the whole swath of New Hampshire she hasn't seen yet. More to come!
-M
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