The Long Trail and the Wilderness Ethic

In nineteen ten, a Burlington lawyer named James Taylor stood on top of Stratton Mountain in southern Vermont and had an idea. He had just made a difficult bushwhack through second-growth forest and scrub, and he was thinking about what it would mean to have a clear footpath running the length of the Green Mountains from Massachusetts to Canada. A path maintained by volunteers. Open to anyone. An invitation to know the mountains from the inside rather than from a carriage road or a resort terrace.

Taylor founded the Green Mountain Club that same year, in March of nineteen ten, and began organizing the trail that would become the Long Trail. Work proceeded in sections, with volunteer crews clearing route, building shelters, and blazing trees with white paint. The full trail, running two hundred and seventy-three miles from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian line, was completed in nineteen thirty.

The Long Trail is the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States. It predates the Appalachian Trail, which was partly inspired by the Long Trail model. In fact, the two trails share the same path for about one hundred miles in southern Vermont, where the Appalachian Trail follows the Long Trail north before breaking off east toward New Hampshire.

The shelters along the Long Trail are simple three-sided structures, open at the front, with a sleeping loft and a fireplace. They are maintained by Green Mountain Club volunteers. Some of them are original structures from the nineteen twenties, repaired and re-roofed over the decades but unchanged in character. Use is free.

Vermont Act Two Fifty, passed in nineteen seventy, established one of the strictest land-use planning systems in any American state, partly as a response to the development pressures the ski industry had brought to the mountains. The Long Trail, the town forests, the conserved working landscapes, and the Act Two Fifty framework together represent a particular Vermont conviction: that the landscape is held in trust, and that the people who live on it have an obligation to pass it on intact.