Blaze of Glory
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Historical Images courtesy of Green Mountain Club
Stratton was a perfectly fine mountain, with good views across to several other well-known peaks-Equinox, Ascutney, Snow and Monadnock-but I couldn’t say that it was a summit that would have inspired me to grab a hatchet and start clearing a trail from Georgia to Quebec.
That’s what Bill Bryson wrote in Chapter 16 of his laugh-out-loud trail diary A Walk in the Woods, still a travel classic twelve years after it first went to press.
Bryson‘s hike, which began at Georgia’s Springer Mountain on the Appalachian Trail, took him along a section through Vermont, where it is, in fact, the older Long Trail. Wisecracking and full of foolery every step of the way, he walked up and over the top of Stratton Mountain one “overcast, mercifully cool day in June,” staying on the Long Trail until the fork at Willard Gap set him eastbound on the AT.
Fortunately, Stratton’s peak, Vermont’s eighth highest at 3,875 feet, did inspire two other men to envision very long trails. Already steeped in equal parts of fact and folklore, the crib notes of their stories go like this: One summer day in 1909, James Paddock Taylor was sitting in a tent in the mountains staring at Stratton’s summit, or rather at the rainy mist hiding its peak, when he conceived of a long trail running along the entire spine of the Green Mountains. One summer day twelve years later, Benton Mac Kaye of the U.S. Forest Service was on Stratton Mountain when he began to imagine a similar route atop the Appalachian Mountains, a distance of more than 2,000 miles from the deep South to the Canadian border.[img_assist|nid=805|title=The envisioned Long Trail, drawn by James P. Taylor in 1910|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=157|height=250]
The making of the Long Trail is an American story if there ever was one, and it all began with the Green Mountain Club…