IV
OVER VERMONT'S HIGHEST SPOTS 

THREE of us sat on the westerly slope of the Sterling Range of the Green Mountains, across which we had been toiling all through a richly humid July afternoon. A few years back the loggers had stripped the timber from many hundred acres along that moun­tain-side. In place of the shadowy spruce forest there had come up a jungle of cherry, poplar, mountain ash, and raspberry vines, a cover that let in the sun and shut out the air. We had stopped to mop for a moment, and to sample a trickle of the first live water we had seen for some hours.

"I was thinking a while ago," said one of my comrades, "that I never was so hot before in all the days of my life, and that this is a poor time of year for mountain hik­ing in this latitude."

"A man sweats just as hard, doesn't he," retorted the other man, "when he paddles up a mountain on snowshoes in February? "

About the only difference that I could see was that the black flies and "no-see-urns," that rose at us in swarms out of the brush whenever we paused on that July day, are blissfully missing in February. Indeed, had we postponed our trip but a single month we might have escaped those pests which are reputed to mysteriously disappear in August.

It was three members of that outfit that had sauntered through the White Hills the year before who were now seeking the wild places of Vermont as a vacation ground. The call of the Long Trail of the Green Mountain Club had come to us. In the first place, we were a bit ashamed at realizing how little we knew of the physical geography of the Green Mountain State. And yet were we wholly to blame? Fifty years ago Vermont people conceived the idea that their mountains were destined to win public appreciation as summer resorts, and hotels were built on a few of the principal summits. Of these but one is still entertaining guests. The others failed to receive the anticipated appreciation and long since disappeared by fire, porcu­pines, or decay. Within the past few years the tramping cult having been espoused by the Vermonters themselves, the Green Mountain Club has energetically begun the systematic development of the walking possi­bilities, and the region is surely destined now to become popular with the hiker. They have the hills, and the State has been doing its part toward the protection and restoration of the forests. The trails are stretching out north and south along the main ranges year by year. Steadily these are being improved, and as the traffic increases so will the inci­dental facilities, such as lodging-camps, multiply.

For our week afield we had chosen that section of the Long Trail that tops the high­est peaks and ridges of the north central por­tion of the range, linking Sterling Mountain with Mount Mansfield, master of them all, and so south to Bolton's wooded crown and over the ridges of Camel's Hump. For the same reasons that attracted us, this section of the trail seems likely to win great popularity, leading as it does to two of the high­est and best-known summits, and past the doors of hospitable camps and hotels that are happily located a fair day's march apart.

Should any be tempted to follow in our footsteps, let him not suppose that this is a stroll on graded paths where ankle-ties may be worn in comfort. There are stretches, in fact, that are rough enough to please the fancy of the toughest woodsman, and yet the way is sufficiently clear for any one fa­miliar with mountain trails to follow safely. It was pathetic to note the track of a woman's foot in a muddy bit of trail, the pointed toe, narrow shank, and peg heel, all spelling plainly the fatigue and general discomfort that must have been the wearer's lot for days after that experience. Let the novice, whatever the gender, take advice from the experienced before setting forth, and sanely following the same go merrily tripping, where otherwise it might be a woeful hobble.

To do full justice to the course of the trail as it lies from Johnson village, just north of Sterling Mountain, over Mount Mansfield to Camel's Hump, requires at least four full days of regulation summer daylight length. For the more leisurely yet another day, or even more, would be added without waste of time. It is not difficult to surmise into which class our party naturally fell. In truth, we would cheerfully have exchanged our first day's experience for something much less energetic. Fifteen miles on a long summer's day is not an inordinately extended march in the mountains for any fairly seasoned walker. It is confessed that we were tem­peramentally averse to hiking, at least in so far as that word is synonymous with hustling, and greatly given to viewing the landscape o'er in leisurely fashion from every coign of vantage. To feel the pinch of time along a beautiful forest trail, or on a sightly ridge path, is as annoying as poverty in the finan­cial sense. When one has journeyed a hun­dred miles or more to visit new scenes, he feels that he wants his money's worth. It is the firm conviction of old-timers that "hus­tle "is a word that should be left in town with store clothes when a walking trip is on.

That fifteen miles or so across the Sterl­ing Range from Johnson village, on the St. Johnsbury & Lake Champlain Railroad, to the depths of Smuggler's Notch, is a stretch to be approached with respectful consideration. By one mountaineer the dis­tance was given to us as "at least fifteen miles." By yet another it was given with greater exactness, so we later thought, even if with less mathematical precision, when he said it was farther than he wanted to foot it on a hot day. With its ups and downs of contour, and its overs and unders of wind­falls (the latter a temporary handicap not likely to be present in every season), enough foot pounds of effort were required to have taken us up and across the Presidential Peaks of the White Mountains. For one equipped with his own bed and board, a cabin, read­ily found on a side trail, is available between Morse Mountain and the Madonna, ten miles or less south of Johnson. On a less perspiry day, and with a cleared trail, the need for such a halting-place would not be felt.

A mountain tarn is ever a pleasing feature, and the three-lobed Sterling Pond, that mir­rors the forest at the western base of the Ma­donna's cone, is a delightful spot to tarry by before making the long downward plunge into Smuggler's Notch. Two routes lead thither from the westerly end of the pond, both attractive in their way. The shorter leads south along a timbered ridge to descend over the old logging roads down the steep southern cut-over face of the mountain, with views across the notch to Mount Mansfield. The longer way follows down through the forest to the northern end of the notch, near the height of land, where it joins the highroad. In distance the latter is longer, but it has its compensations, and it includes the passage of the beautiful notch as a part of the trip.

Worth while as it is the Sterling Moun­tain link is not an essential feature of the Mount Mansfield-Camel's Hump jaunt, ex­cept for those who tramp purely for tramping's sake. The link across Bolton Moun­tain, between Mount Mansfield and Camel's Hump, may similarly be eliminated; at least until the view from Bolton Mountain, which ought to be impressive, is made available by the erection of a tower on the wooded sum­mit. One of the advantages of the Long Trail is in the ease with which it may be broken in upon or left on any day. So Barnes' Camp, the tramper's haven at the southerly end of Smuggler's Notch, is readily found from the railroad at Waterbury via the trolley line to Stowe. A night at the camp may profitably be followed by a forenoon's exploration of the notch, which in two miles has more to show in natural curiosities than many another more celebrated mountain cleft. Were it not for the great spring that furnishes an outlet for Sterling Pond, fifteen hundred feet or more above, or for the house-size fragments of Mount Mansfield's cliffs that have come down from time to time to choke the gorge, or for the great caves and early summer snowbanks in the eastern flank of the big mountain, the notch would still be an attrac­tion because of the towering rock walls rising sheer a full thousand feet on either hand.

Smuggler's Notch enjoys the geographical distinction of being the only pass through the main Green Mountain Range that has a north-and-south trend, all other passes lead­ing east and west. Appropriate to its name there is a tradition of somewhat elusive ori­gin, and apparently not widely known, that lends a flavor of frontier picturesqueness to the place. In ye olden time, somewhat more than a hundred years ago, or more explicitly just prior to the war with Great Britain in 1812, Congress placed a ban on all commer­cial dealings between the States and Canada. As a result every "Stealthy Steve "along the border saw his chance to turn a perfectly sound though dishonest dollar in the crafty trade of smuggling. In this the Vermont border played an active part, much of the plunder being transported across Champlain, where brushes with the customs officers were not infrequent. It was one of these illicit freighters, so the story goes, who, being hard pressed by the revenue men, fled to this mountain fastness with his family. Some there are who say that a mysterious man, who long ago lived in the southern end of the notch, was probably the escaped and re­morseful smuggler, while others point to a poem, written in the early fifties by a resident of Stowe, in which the smuggler is finally rescued from his exile by a son, once a mem­ber of the band, but who had become pros­perous in a supposedly reformed career in the great West. Be all this as it may, one can see the cave to-day wherein this smug­gler, and perchance many another too, may have hidden.

Many years ago a small hotel was built near the great spring, but although its day has passed, the spring remains as one of the chief attractions of the notch. Issuing from the foot of the cliffs of Sterling Mountain, it wells up at the estimated rate of between one hundred and two hundred gallons to the minute, and maintains a constant tempera­ture, winter and summer, of approximately fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Geologists have ap­parently arrived at the conclusion that this water works its way down through the rock fissures from Sterling Pond.

Of the great rocks that have fallen into the notch from the Mansfield side, two are of especial note on account of their truly enormous size, and because an interval of exactly one hundred years elapsed between their falls. Barton's Rock, so-called because it fell on the day when a new son of the hills, Barton Ingraham, was born in 1811, is surpassed in size by the King Rock, esti­mated to weigh not far from five thousand tons, which was torn from the cliffs a thou­sand feet above in 1911. The notch is sure to be recognized as one of the great scenic features of New England. It but awaits the completion of the State highway through to the valley of the Lamoille River to bring it into connection with an appreciative public.

From Barnes' Camp it is an easy afternoon's climb of two thousand feet, or a trifle more, along just rising two miles of most enchant­ing forest trail, to the little hotel that stands midway on the four-miles-long ridge of Mount Mansfield, the true-enough high spot of Ver­mont. This hotel enjoys the distinction of being the sole survivor of the three Green Mountain crest retreats, built at about the same period, or just before the Civil War, the others having been located on Camel's Hump and on Killington Peak. This one on Mount Mansfield, the oldest of the three, dates from 1857, and still breasts the storms as gallantly as of yore. A night there is not imperative if one will devote a long full day to crossing the mountain from Smuggler's Notch to Nebraska Notch, which is the next lodging-station along the trail. No leisurely mountain lover would willingly hasten here, however, for the big mountain in its rocks and flora holds much to interest even the amateur in geological and botanical science, and there are two peaks, a mile and a half apart, to explore for a comparison of views, not to speak of caverns whose galleries are said to ramify for fully two hundred feet within the summit rocks.

 
Mount Mansfield, with Smuggler's Notch and the Sterling Range to the east.
 

To the geologist Mount Mansfield tells a wonderful tale of how the vast glacial flood of eons past came dashing upon it from the north, engulfing its topmost crags, even grinding them away in part. Not only do the summit ledges, rounded by the overriding ice, still bear the grooves and scratches scoured into them by the grit that the gla­cier dragged along, but here and there are still perched fragments of the selfsame grit, huge bits plucked from the mountain's own flanks, some, indeed, brought from afar, and left stranded there by the melting man­tle. In the woods beside the mountain car­riage road, not far below the hotel (elevation 3250), lies a five-foot boulder of labradorite that commands the attention of every geo­logically inclined visitor. This bit of Ver­mont landscape was probably born some­where to the northward of Montreal, more than one hundred miles away, since it is there that the nearest parent ledges of that form of rock are native. Its deportation from Canada across the border to the Green Mountain State was decreed and carried out by the irresistible forces of the arctic invader of old.

It is small wonder that the University of Vermont men take so great an interest in the mountains of the State, and in their de­velopment as an attraction for tourists, since the title to this, the highest summit, is in large part vested in their institution. And the State itself is showing a jealous regard for the forests of its greatest mountain, and has already acquired large tracts, exceeding in all five thousand acres, reaching from the summit far down the slopes on the east and south, a beginning for a reservation that it is to be hoped will eventually include the mountain as a whole.

Six and a quarter miles of pleasant forest jogging lies between the Nose, the central and second highest summit on the Mans­field ridge, and Lake Mansfield, at the east­ern entrance to Nebraska Notch, where the most genuine and generous hospitality is extended to wanderers over the Long Trail by the members of the Trout Club.

It has already been intimated that the eleven and a quarter miles across Bolton Mountain, from Lake Mansfield to the north­ern flanks of Camel's Hump in the Winoo­ski valley, may be treated censoriously, or, in other words, deleted, until the summit view, now shut in by the forest, is opened up by vista-cutting, or by the erection of a tripod tower. With its dashing trout-brook it has its attractions none the less, and the trail is clearly marked and easily followed. The twenty miles of pretty country road that lie between the Trout Club and the ford at Bolton village, where begins the as­cent of Camel's Hump, are made agreeably possible to-day, even after a leisurely break­fast, by virtue of the ever-present "flivver "and its modest rate of hire.

By the Long Trail proper to the summit of Camel's Hump it is four and a half miles of steady uphill through the woods, and across a bit of brush-grown burn, from the Bolton ford. As an alternative there is the slightly longer drive from the Trout Club through Waterbury, to cross the Winooski River by the only bridge in several miles, to approach the mountain from the North Duxbury side by the Callahan Trail. By this route three miles of relatively easy up­grade makes the summit, with its little group of three galvanized-iron huts, located in a cozy glade under the northern shoulder of the peak, where for seventeen years stood the Green Mountain House, until fire re­moved it in 1877. Here, too, are bed and board of the usual unpretending mountain sort, set out by the hospitality of the Camel's Hump Club of Waterbury.

Whoever it was who fastened upon this mountain the name of "Camel's Hump" would be without honor with many in Ver­mont to-day. Descriptive it may be as the mountain's peaked top is seen from some points of view, but no one who has gazed that way from Burlington on the west, or looked up at its summit from the Duxbury valley at its eastern foot, could fail to feel the greater truthfulness of the name that tradition says was bestowed upon it in the early years of the seventeenth century by the chaplain of Champlain's expedition  — "Le Lion Couchant."

As "Le Lion Couchant" it was known in 1851 to Frederika Bremer, a Swedish novelist, who thus named it in her "Im­pressions of America," terming it "a mag­nificent giant form." The appropriateness of the original name must likewise have im­pressed William Dean Howells at the time of his writing the story of "The Land­lord of the Lion's Head." He there de­scribed the mountain's outline as having "the form of a sleeping lion, . . . the mighty head resting, with the tossed mane, upon the vast paws stretched before it." And so if Vermonters have their way the mountain's strength and majesty, the mem­ory of the French discoverers, and the eter­nal fitness of things, will all be given recog­nition in a rechristening of "The Couching Lion." It will be well to bear this in mind when following the Long Trail where the arrow-signs that point the way frequently bear the legend of so many miles to Couch­ing Lion.

Although four hundred feet lower than Mount Mansfield, this mountain, standing out by itself with naked cone, commands a view that is more extended than that from its big sister to the north. Its summit is dis­tinctly a place where one would loiter indef­initely in fair weather, and we were favored by a lifting of the haze for as fair a summer afternoon's view as one could desire, a view that ranged north to the Quebec border, east to Camel's Rump in Maine, and to the White Mountains, south along the Green Mountain Ranges, with their wide, culti­vated troughs between, and west over Lake Champlain to the tumbling masses of the Adirondacks: an afternoon of sunshine and floating cloud-forms, succeeded by a spec­tacular sunset, and the golden splendors of a full moon.

 

FIVE DAYS ON VERMONT'S HIGH SPOTS

First Day                                   MILES    HRS.    MIN.

Johnson Station (H. & M. R.R.) to                

Whiteface summit                      5.50       3          30

To Morse Mountain and Madonna summit

(shelter campen route)              9.75       6          30

To Sterling Pond.                       11.75     7          30

To Smuggler's Notch (Barnes'                      

Camp)                                          15.00     10        00

 

Second Day                               MILES     HRS.   MIN

Barnes' Camp to Mansfield Nose      .

via Running Water Trail . . .         2.33        2          00

To the Chin, main summit, and

return to hotel at Nose                  5.33         5          00

 

Third Day                                         

Nose to Lake Mansfield Trout      

Club                                                6.25         5          00

 

Fourth Day                                       

Lake Mansfield to Bolton Mountain

summit.                                          3.50         4          00

To Bolton village                        11.25          9          00

 

Fifth Day                                          

Bolton to Couching Lion summit    4.50         5          00

To Callahan Farm at North           

Duxbury base                                   7.50         7          00

To Central Vermont Railroad at        

North Duxbury via highway             11.10     8            30

 

* The mileage and elapsed time are cumulative for each day, dis­tance and time being figured from point last named in previous line. The times here given are sufficient for leisurely walking. The trail from Johnson to Smuggler's Notch is unsurveyed and distances given are therefore approximate.

MAP: Trail survey from Smuggler's Notch to Couching Lion, by Herbert Wheaton Congdon, and published by Green Mountain Club, Burlington, Vt.