The Long Trail — The Footpath That Started Everything

The Long Trail was completed in nineteen thirty, after two decades of construction by volunteer crews working their way south through the spine of Vermont. It runs two hundred seventy-three miles from the Canadian border to the Massachusetts line, following the main ridge of the Green Mountains, and it is the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States. It predates the Appalachian Trail's completion by about seven years. In a very specific and documented sense, it is also the reason the Appalachian Trail exists.

Benton MacKaye was a forester and regional planner who had been thinking about the relationship between industrial civilization and the natural world for years. In nineteen twenty-one he published a proposal in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects for a continuous trail along the Appalachian ridgeline from Georgia to Maine, a footpath in the wilderness that would run through the longest stretch of relatively undeveloped country remaining in the eastern United States. The idea was not entirely his own. He had spent time on the Long Trail in Vermont and had seen what that kind of continuous ridgeline trail did to the people who walked it.

The Appalachian Trail was officially completed in nineteen thirty-seven. For the first four hundred miles of that trail through Vermont, the AT and the Long Trail share the same path. They diverge at a rock cairn north of Killington, where the Long Trail continues north toward Canada and the AT turns east toward New Hampshire and ultimately Maine.

The Green Mountain Club, which maintains the Long Trail, was founded in nineteen ten. The organization of volunteers who build and maintain the trail system in Vermont is the oldest trail-maintaining organization of its kind in the country. The work they do each spring to repair what winter has undone is not glamorous, and they do not do it for recognition. The trail is the record of the work.