IVE THOUSAND YEARS ago, the trail that Vermonters now call a “footpath in the wilderness,” cut through mountain woods along a stream in southern Vermont. The native people who hiked this path were not seeking a wilderness experience. They were walking to work. The path they blazed led to a quartzite quarry where they gathered chunks of grayish-white rock for making tools. The remains of this outdoor assembly line lie on the Long Trail, a glistening reminder of the terrain’s first human use. The Long Trail is a natural corridor running the length of Vermont. As it cuts across the mountaintops, the footpath weaves in and out of Vermont history. Hiking the trail from Arlington to Danby, as I did with a friend, it is a woods-walk through time.
Our pace of about 10 miles a day was perfect for witnessing the changing uses of the land. And for imagining the generations of people who scraped out rough-and-tumble lives in the hills.
“The landscape is a continuum of use and then we put the Long Trail in and say that it’s a footpath through the wilderness,” said U.S. Forest Service archaeologist David Lacy. “Not really. It’s a footpath through the re-growth. It’s just an absolute storm of change if you look at it over any period of time.”
Walking south to north, we walked also from the present to the past — from ski trails and heavily used campgrounds to abandoned cellar holes, charcoal kilns, sheep pastures and even a saw mill.
Surrounding our path were thousands of acres of trees, 80 to 100 years old, forest again where settlers had cleared the land.
Hidden in the forest are signs of settlements like Rootville, Greeley and Old Job — abandoned villages where more than a century ago children went to school and adults worked in mills and shops.
Our five-day hike began at the base of Stratton Mountain on a muggy and buggy June afternoon. I was excited to be throwing away my city-bound life for silence, for oatmeal, for leafy canopies, for a swim in a mountain pond and for the six mountain peaks we would traverse.
At 3,936 feet, Stratton Mountain — the first summit — was also the highest of the trip. Severe thunderstorms prevented a stay of any length on its cloud-covered top. My buddy and I ran across the broad, flat summit with barely a glance at the fire tower built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, Roosevelt’s public work force.
Earlier hikers, like George Barber of Bradford, could more easily picture the denuded landscape that once rolled below Stratton’s summit. Barber walked the Long Trail when it still crossed open meadows and farm fields.
Barber, an 84-year-old mechanic who specializes in Model A’s, was the ninth to hike the 269-mile trail when he completed it in 1928 as a 16-year-old. He saw a bear when he was climbing a tree to scrape spruce gum for backwoods chewing gum; he cut across fields to farmhouses for eggs and milk.
“We had an awful time trying to find the trail,” Barber recalls. “I can remember a lot of farmland and pastures we’d have to cross with no markings.”
Our first-day markings took us seven miles to Stratton Pond, the trail’s most heavily used camping area.
It was a quiet night. A loon floated alone on the water; only three campers swatted mosquitoes and slept to the trill of tree frogs.
But a look at the mud and a talk with the caretaker revealed signs of heavy use: all-terrain vehicle tracks coursed through the nearby Lye Brook Wilderness Area.
A walk the next morning over a fir-needled trail led to Bourn Pond in Lye Brook Wilderness Area. The flat, forested acres were tamed by homesteaders more than 150 years ago and are still crisscrossed by a network of paths and old logging roads.
The 16,000-acre preserve is one of Vermont’s six federally designated wilderness areas and one of three on our 40-mile hike.
“We’re growing wilderness areas,” said forester Bob Pramuk, of the newest landscapes along the trail.
In the still of the woods where power tools and motorized vehicles are not allowed, we walked along a railroad track where a century ago trains rumbled over a wooden trestle hauling carloads of logs.
The trees were felled for lumber and to fire the charcoal kilns whose smoke filled the woods from the 1850s to the turn of the century. The charcoal fueled the ironworks of southern New England.
Before it was re-routed 20 years ago, the Long Trail followed Bourn Brook from Bourn Pond and meandered near the vestiges of brick charcoal kilns. When Victor Rolando discovered the kilns, the 64-year-old archaeologist also found apple trees, lilac bushes and tufts of scallions, reminders of the simple settlement in the harsh and secluded hills.
“People were born and raised and died up there,” Rolando said, “That was life: winter and summer.”
Wintertime was the season for logging, when the ground was frozen and the trees easier to cut because the sap was in their roots. The select wood was sold to nearby saw mills. The slash was fed to fires in the kilns the men worked round the clock for a dollar a day, probably in 12-hour shifts.
The labor was so demanding that families had little time for hunting and trapped animals for food. Many tended small gardens and kept and animal or two. Our 12-hour shift was reserved for walking and watching. A burst of lilacs signaled the abandoned logging village of Rootville.
We wandered down the muddy ruts of Rootville Road to Prospect Rock — a welcome opening in the forest overlooking the tourist and shopping mecca of Manchester.
We pitched the tent right there by the rock.
An accurate weather report came the next morning on Spruce Peak, where we watched two farmers mow hay in the valley below. The message was clear — the farmers were expecting several days of dry weather.
That afternoon, not long after the trail crossed old Vermont 30, we came across the broken bricks of an abandoned charcoal kiln — one of hundreds that Rolando estimates covered the southern Vermont hills.
Most took a good-sized chunk out of the ground: the ovens’ diameter were 28 feet and they stood 16 feet high. Workers built ramps from nearby ridges to help them topload the kilns.
But we developed our own plan, almost as technical as making charcoal. Soon we’d be at a crossroads just outside Manchester. We’d use the cell phone I carried to order a pizza and have it delivered to the trailhead.
Alas, modern technology is not all it’s cracked up to be. The line crackled and fizzled as I shouted “onions” and “where the Long Trail crosses 11 and 30,” and, finally, “never mind” to a confused restaurant worker. Dejected, I hung up and scrounged in the pack for peanut butter.
After lazing in the parking lot we began the steep haul up Bromley Mountain. A slope where grazing sheep kept the land clear 150 years ago is kept open today by tractors clearing trails for skiers.
Beneath the lift line where shepherds pastured their animals, the path was a full-force black attack zone. We took shelter in the ski patrol hut and never left.
A nighttime cold front created the perfect day for another wilderness area, another mountain.
We were rewarded for the next day’s efforts at Griffith Lake, where Silas Griffith, Vermont’s first millionaire, once had a second home. We searched but could not find its foundation.
We were alone at the still water. We took a soothing swim.
Baker Peak, at 2,850 feet, beckoned in the morning: the last of our six summits. A scramble up steep ledges and large rocks ended at an open peak. Its views were glorious — and bittersweet. At the base we could make out Forest Road No. 10, where our hike would end.
The trail down Baker Peak wanders through Big Branch Wilderness Area. The path through the 120-year-old trees descends to reveal the stone foundation of a mid-19th century sawmill, hand dug and water-powered, by the rocky shore of the powerful Big Branch.
Nearby is a small cemetery, a resting place in hills that hummed with activity. My boots would turn black again before the hike was over, a reliable clue that more kilns had burned hot along the stream. A short search turns up the familiar outline of the sturdy furnaces, four in a row. A moment later I’m standing in the circle of an oven long cold.
Finally, mysteriously hidden in the shut down industrial forest we find the longest-running factory of all — the quartzite quarry where native people fashioned tools with rock hammers and antler billets.
“I was walking along, looking down, and there were thousands of flakes that were this big,” said Lacy, holding his fingers about an inch apart. “The light hit it just right and it was like it had just snowed. It was stunning.”
Lacy was describing the late summer day in 1986 when he discovered the Native American toolmaking site. The phenomenal find — evidence of a workshop in the woods — measures one kilometer by 500 meters. The artifacts helped confirm Lacy’s belief that native people, like those who came later, made use of the mountains.
On a slope east of the trail, in the heart of the site, is testimony of another kind. Here Lacy found not flakes from a work area, but pieces of quartzite carefully left on two large, mossy rocks. An offering in the woods.
“It’s giving back to Mother Earth,” Lacy said. “You take and you give back. You say, ‘Thanks.”’
©1996 The Burlington Free Press
