Long Trail

The Long Trail is the country's oldest long-distance hiking trail — the Green Mountain Club cut it between 1910 and 1930, twenty years before the Appalachian Trail finished its first end-to-end completion in 1937, and it remains the spine that the AT's southern Vermont section shadows for 100 miles between the Massachusetts border and the Maine Junction north of Killington. The two trails were physically the same path until 1968 when the AT was rerouted east to follow the Connecticut River valley while the LT continued north along the ridge to Canada.

Walking the LT northbound from the Massachusetts border at Pine Cobble to the Canadian border at Journey's End in North Troy is 273 miles, 65,000 feet of cumulative climb, and — by Long Trail veterans' published consensus — roughly twice the effort-per-mile of the AT. The reason is structural: the Green Mountain Club builds trail straight up the fall line rather than installing switchbacks, and Vermont's metamorphic schist and quartzite bedrock means most ridge sections are wet, mossy, root-tangled, and steep with rock-step climbs that turn into vertical scrambles in rain. The northern half of the trail (north of US 4 at Killington) gets progressively harder — Camel's Hump, Mt Mansfield, the Hump-Mansfield-Madonna ridge complex, and the final 100 miles to Canada include trail sections rated very-strenuous on the USFS hiking scale.

The trail's 70 backcountry shelters are first-come-first-served (no reservations, no fees most of the year), maintained by GMC staff plus the 14 GMC sections that adopt segments under volunteer cooperative agreements. The shelters range from open three-sided lean-tos to fully-enclosed cabins with woodstoves; the GMC publishes a current shelter inventory at greenmountainclub.org. Caretakers staff 12 of the most-trafficked shelters during peak season (June through Labor Day) and collect a $5 overnight fee that funds privy maintenance and tent-platform repairs. Above-treeline camping is prohibited on Camel's Hump, Mt Mansfield's Chin and Forehead, and Mt Abraham — the alpine vegetation zones got the formal protection rule in 1984 after decades of trampling damage.

RV staging is at Smugglers' Notch State Park near the Mt. Mansfield crossing (38-ft rig cap, dry only, 20 sites of which 14 are lean-to platforms, gated at the actual notch where VT 108 narrows to one-lane between the Smugglers Notch Resort and Stowe ski area — RVs over 20 ft are prohibited on the notch road, so southbound rigs from Stowe must detour via VT 100 and Route 15), at Underhill State Park on Mansfield's west side (the alternate Mansfield approach with a 22-ft rig cap and dry-only sites), at Little River State Park near Waterbury (45-ft cap, electric and water hookups on 81 of 100 sites — the highest-amenity rig basecamp for the central Long Trail), and at Quechee State Park near the central Vermont midpoint (45-ft cap, electric hookups, 7 minutes off I-89 exit 1, the easiest interstate-accessible rig staging for the LT central section). The northern terminus at Journey's End trailhead in North Troy has a primitive dirt-lot turnaround that no RV should attempt — the access road's last 2 miles are washed-out class 4 dirt that's marginal for passenger cars after rain; section-hikers exit at Jay Pass on VT 242 instead, where the Jay State Forest parking area accepts oversize day-use vehicles. Hazen's Notch State Park near the actual northern segment has 22-ft cap dry sites for hikers staging the final 30 miles.

Weather windows: the GMC closes the highest 4,000-ft peaks (Mansfield's summit ridge, Camel's Hump, Abraham, Killington, Pico) to public hiking April 15 through Memorial Day each year for mud-season trail protection — fines apply for violators, and the soil damage from spring hiking takes years to revegetate.