Looking north from the top of Mount Mansfield, Vt. (Compass Points Media / flickr) http://www.flickr.com/photos/compasspointsmedia/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
They came to Burlington on March 11, 1910 led by James Taylor to fashion a unique idea, one that the likes of Thoreau and Muir would find intriguing. They would in the years to come create a walking path through the mountainous wilderness of Vermont from its southern border with Massachusetts all the way to Canada.
Psshhht, they’re detractors scoffed. Who would want to walk all that way? This was the Industrial Age! Industry was making life easier, more progressed. We already left Eden or evolved from apes in the wilderness, depending on your point of view even then, why go back?
But the Burlington conference pressed on, became the Green Mountain Club, and created during the next 20 years the Granddaddy of hiking trails – the 273-mile long Long Trail.
Interestingly, despite a strong conservation movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s spurred by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs and George Bird Grinnell, the Green Mountain Club remained neutral on most wilderness issues. But something would force it to take a stand. According to the Green Mountain Club:
During most of its history the GMC has chosen not to become involved in national conservation issues, concentrating its energy on preserving the wilderness character of the Long Trail. In the mid-1930s, however, when a scenic highway, called the Green Mountain Parkway, was proposed for the length of the Green Mountain Range, the Club mounted energetic opposition. Vermonters ultimately rejected the idea in a statewide referendum. In 1958 when the U. S. Air Force dropped its plan to erect a missile communications facility on the Chin of Mount Mansfield, it was in part due to GMC opposition.
The Long Trail provided the inspiration for Benton MacKaye, the man behind the idea of the Appalachian Trail. The two paths share 100 miles from the Massachusetts border to Rutland.
Take a trip on the Long Trail, either a day hike or backpack, and you’ll see shadowy boreal forests, black bears, small New England towns, fire tower views and the mysterious arctic alpine gardens at summits like Mount Mansfield.
To see what inspired Taylor and MacKaye, take a day hike up to the fire tower standing at Stratton Mountain’s summit. It won’t be hard to understand how Vermont and the Green Mountains captured their imagination.
Today is the Green Mountain Club’s birthday. Here’s to you folks for all the hard work you do in maintaining an icon!
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Great post! I’ve hiked the portion of the Long Trail that it shares with A.T. on my way to Katahdin, but the entire LT is definitely on my ever-growing bucket list. Happy centennial birthday, LT.
I remember meeting about 20 people thru-hiking the LT while I was hiking the AT – most I saw just two days north of the southern terminus of the LT – and we’d get to chatting and when the inevitable question of how far are you hiking came up they’d puff up there chest and say “I’m hiking the Long Trail – all the way to Canada”. It always, always made me smile and I’d usually keep quiet about being close to completing a thru-hike of the AT and just wait to see their faces when I signed the trail register – “Moleman GA – ME”. God, I can’t wait to get back on the trail.