I hope to write a more descritive trip report on my web site within a few days, but here are some more general comments.
Rationale for trip
Judy (a fellow trip leader for the Boston Chapter of the AMC) is seriously doing the NEHH in winter, and while I have no hopes of completing that daunting list I am interested in doing as many of them as I can within my limited abilities. Both of us are far more interested in enjoying hikes than in rushing through lists, and both enjoy doing things somewhat outside the "standard" routes.
This fall we planned a VT HH weekend. It would have been easy to do Mendon and Pico as two separate hikes (yawn
), so we decided to attempt to follow the logging road to the LT, and then do Killington and Pico by the LT and side trails. I had, over the last few years, read many trip reports of summer Mendon-Killington loops, but none in winter. Seemed intersting, so we planned an AMC trip over the three peaks.
I posted a query on one of the hiking bulletin boards about the logging road, and the responses indicated that even in summer the upper part of the route is somewhat obscure, and that it is quite easy to miss the point where it turns uphill (neither I nor Google seem able to find that thread; if you know where it is please PM me). Bobandgeri emailed me the jpeg posted on their site, and later emailed me a blown up section of that jpeg, and added a couple of waypoints. MichaelJ posted a link to his jpeg, and after I requested it sent me a tpo file that I imported into Topo!.
Preparing for the trip
In late December I planned a scouting trip, intending to follow the logging road and see how easy it was to reach the LT. Alas, Eddy Brook was very high, and I was unwilling to attempt the difficult crossing alone. Second alas, I did not think of bushwhacking along the north bank of Eddy Brook until the logging road returned to that bank, a little less than half a mile further. The woods where completely open, I suspect that it would have been a very easy 'whack.
A week before our trip Frodo posted a trail conditions report in which he said that his group followed an "alternate logging road". Both he and Arm (a companion on that trip) sent me descriptions of that route, and Arm strongly suggested that I try it instead of the standard route.
Arm told me that two groups (well, one "group" was a solo hiker) had experienced serious problems on the standard route a day or so before Frodo and companions did the trip. The solo hiker got completely lost, and ended up somewhere near Killington before bailing out. I discounted that, as he had obviously made a serious navigation error at some point. But the other couple, bushwhackers that I respect very much, "thrashed around" on the standard route, and finding a track going down by a different route followed it.
That second report caused me to think hard. On the one hand, when people I respect find a route difficult, I have to assume that it is difficult. On the other hand I have done the standard route twice in summer, the last time a couple of years ago, and found the bushwhack 90% easy, followed by a short very dense climb to the eastern summit. I had great difficulty imagining how it could become a difficult bushwhack, even in winter.
Since I am retired I drove to Vermont early on Friday, and went straight to Brewers Corner to explore the "alternate route". The description was not completely clear, but I was looking for an "abandonned logging road" leaving from a logging yard shortly after the house. The road that I found that seemed to fit the descrition was very old, with extensive new growth in the roadbed. The corridor was reasonably easy to follow from the navigation point of view, but was almost a bushwhack from the vegetation point of view. It reached Eddy Brook at a point where I saw no easy crossing, and more to the point I saw no open corridor on the other side of the brook.
That evening I discussed what I had found with Judy and with the participants on our trip. One of them (Donna) had been in the area the previous weekend, and had met with Frodo, Arm and others. From what she had heard from them she strongly recommended that we attempt to find and follow the alternate route. I was much more dubious, since I was sure that the standard bushwhack was, except for the last couple of hundred vertical feet, a walk in the park. We decided to make the final decision on Saturday on the spot.
The trip
On Saturday we were at the trailhead a few minutes after 7 AM, with temps barely above zero. We soon reached the logging yard, and followed my footprints to the abandonned logging road. Judy, my fellow leader, agreed with me that going through that kind of growth all the way to the summit was an unattractive option, given that we had a highway that would lead us to 3,400 feet.
Almost immediately after the first stream crossing we found a logging road diverging from the main one and going straight uphill; it is certainly the one described in Gene Daniell's notes to the HH. We quickly decided that we were not quite adventurous enough to try a route for which we had no information other than a single sentence written more than a decade ago.
The logging road was easy to follow, and at around 3,400 feet we left it to bushwhack to the east peak. The trip was exectly as I recalled it from summer: a walk in the park through almost flat open woods to within a couple of hundred vertical feet from the summit, followed by a steep ascent through dense woods that was nasty, brutish but short From there we descended steeply to the herd path between the two summits; we kept losing it and rejoing it, but the trip between the summits was uneventful. On the main summit it took us a few minutes to find the cannister (we were unable to open it) but we had no doubt that we were on the highest point.
The return trip to the logging road was much like the ascent, except that bushwhacking through dense stuff is easier on the way down, where gravity helps you push through the trees. We had little difficulty following the logging road round the head of the valley, but could easily have missed the turning point where it makes a right angled turn in very open woods. Fortunately waypoints taken off of MichaelJ's map showed us where to look for the road to go uphill. We had similar difficulties with the turn on the LT, again the GPS showed us where it was.
I did not do the short but exceedingly step climb to Killington's summit (been there, done that, wanted to conserve my energy), instead staying at the drug den (Cooper Lodge). The folks there were friendly, and quickly ignored me in my corner trying to stay warm.
The rest of the trip was, for me, long and tiring but essentially uneventful. We lost the Sherburne Pass Trail where it crossed a ski trail that had just been groomed (it was dark by then), but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After ten minutes of looking for the trail we decided to descend by the ski trails, the moonlight in the open was so bright that we put away our headlamps. At the base we found someone willing to give one of us a ride to the parked cars (less than half a mile away). Half the group went straight to the Long Trail Inn, the others went to retrieve the parked cars and joined them a bit later.
Two HH highest bagged for the leaders, three peaks (many of the participants had not done Killington in winter yet) for many of the others. A fun day, tiring for the ordinary mortals amongst us, much less so for the two or three superfit hikers in the group. I was so tired that I decided to drop out of the Breadloaf-Wilson hike on Sunday; clearly I did not have 15 miles (ten on trail, five on the unplowed road) left in my legs.
Acknowledgements
I got a huge amount of information from the online hiking community. I think that Stan was the first to mention that the logging road continues all the way to the LT, many others have written about it over the years. As noted above, I got a very informative response when I posted a query about that road, and both Bobandgeri and MichaelJ sent me valuable information. Much earlier docross had sent me a gpx file of his Mendon bushwhack, I found it helpful at some of the forks in the logging road, though we did our own navigation for the bushwhack. Frodo and Arm were both extremely helpful in sharing their experiences from the previous weekend.
Rationale for trip
Judy (a fellow trip leader for the Boston Chapter of the AMC) is seriously doing the NEHH in winter, and while I have no hopes of completing that daunting list I am interested in doing as many of them as I can within my limited abilities. Both of us are far more interested in enjoying hikes than in rushing through lists, and both enjoy doing things somewhat outside the "standard" routes.
This fall we planned a VT HH weekend. It would have been easy to do Mendon and Pico as two separate hikes (yawn
), so we decided to attempt to follow the logging road to the LT, and then do Killington and Pico by the LT and side trails. I had, over the last few years, read many trip reports of summer Mendon-Killington loops, but none in winter. Seemed intersting, so we planned an AMC trip over the three peaks.I posted a query on one of the hiking bulletin boards about the logging road, and the responses indicated that even in summer the upper part of the route is somewhat obscure, and that it is quite easy to miss the point where it turns uphill (neither I nor Google seem able to find that thread; if you know where it is please PM me). Bobandgeri emailed me the jpeg posted on their site, and later emailed me a blown up section of that jpeg, and added a couple of waypoints. MichaelJ posted a link to his jpeg, and after I requested it sent me a tpo file that I imported into Topo!.
Preparing for the trip
In late December I planned a scouting trip, intending to follow the logging road and see how easy it was to reach the LT. Alas, Eddy Brook was very high, and I was unwilling to attempt the difficult crossing alone. Second alas, I did not think of bushwhacking along the north bank of Eddy Brook until the logging road returned to that bank, a little less than half a mile further. The woods where completely open, I suspect that it would have been a very easy 'whack.
A week before our trip Frodo posted a trail conditions report in which he said that his group followed an "alternate logging road". Both he and Arm (a companion on that trip) sent me descriptions of that route, and Arm strongly suggested that I try it instead of the standard route.
Arm told me that two groups (well, one "group" was a solo hiker) had experienced serious problems on the standard route a day or so before Frodo and companions did the trip. The solo hiker got completely lost, and ended up somewhere near Killington before bailing out. I discounted that, as he had obviously made a serious navigation error at some point. But the other couple, bushwhackers that I respect very much, "thrashed around" on the standard route, and finding a track going down by a different route followed it.
That second report caused me to think hard. On the one hand, when people I respect find a route difficult, I have to assume that it is difficult. On the other hand I have done the standard route twice in summer, the last time a couple of years ago, and found the bushwhack 90% easy, followed by a short very dense climb to the eastern summit. I had great difficulty imagining how it could become a difficult bushwhack, even in winter.
Since I am retired I drove to Vermont early on Friday, and went straight to Brewers Corner to explore the "alternate route". The description was not completely clear, but I was looking for an "abandonned logging road" leaving from a logging yard shortly after the house. The road that I found that seemed to fit the descrition was very old, with extensive new growth in the roadbed. The corridor was reasonably easy to follow from the navigation point of view, but was almost a bushwhack from the vegetation point of view. It reached Eddy Brook at a point where I saw no easy crossing, and more to the point I saw no open corridor on the other side of the brook.
That evening I discussed what I had found with Judy and with the participants on our trip. One of them (Donna) had been in the area the previous weekend, and had met with Frodo, Arm and others. From what she had heard from them she strongly recommended that we attempt to find and follow the alternate route. I was much more dubious, since I was sure that the standard bushwhack was, except for the last couple of hundred vertical feet, a walk in the park. We decided to make the final decision on Saturday on the spot.
The trip
On Saturday we were at the trailhead a few minutes after 7 AM, with temps barely above zero. We soon reached the logging yard, and followed my footprints to the abandonned logging road. Judy, my fellow leader, agreed with me that going through that kind of growth all the way to the summit was an unattractive option, given that we had a highway that would lead us to 3,400 feet.
Almost immediately after the first stream crossing we found a logging road diverging from the main one and going straight uphill; it is certainly the one described in Gene Daniell's notes to the HH. We quickly decided that we were not quite adventurous enough to try a route for which we had no information other than a single sentence written more than a decade ago.
The logging road was easy to follow, and at around 3,400 feet we left it to bushwhack to the east peak. The trip was exectly as I recalled it from summer: a walk in the park through almost flat open woods to within a couple of hundred vertical feet from the summit, followed by a steep ascent through dense woods that was nasty, brutish but short
From there we descended steeply to the herd path between the two summits; we kept losing it and rejoing it, but the trip between the summits was uneventful. On the main summit it took us a few minutes to find the cannister (we were unable to open it) but we had no doubt that we were on the highest point.The return trip to the logging road was much like the ascent, except that bushwhacking through dense stuff is easier on the way down, where gravity helps you push through the trees. We had little difficulty following the logging road round the head of the valley, but could easily have missed the turning point where it makes a right angled turn in very open woods. Fortunately waypoints taken off of MichaelJ's map showed us where to look for the road to go uphill. We had similar difficulties with the turn on the LT, again the GPS showed us where it was.
I did not do the short but exceedingly step climb to Killington's summit (been there, done that, wanted to conserve my energy), instead staying at the drug den (Cooper Lodge). The folks there were friendly, and quickly ignored me in my corner trying to stay warm.
The rest of the trip was, for me, long and tiring but essentially uneventful. We lost the Sherburne Pass Trail where it crossed a ski trail that had just been groomed (it was dark by then), but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After ten minutes of looking for the trail we decided to descend by the ski trails, the moonlight in the open was so bright that we put away our headlamps. At the base we found someone willing to give one of us a ride to the parked cars (less than half a mile away). Half the group went straight to the Long Trail Inn, the others went to retrieve the parked cars and joined them a bit later.
Two HH highest bagged for the leaders, three peaks (many of the participants had not done Killington in winter yet) for many of the others. A fun day, tiring for the ordinary mortals amongst us, much less so for the two or three superfit hikers in the group. I was so tired that I decided to drop out of the Breadloaf-Wilson hike on Sunday; clearly I did not have 15 miles (ten on trail, five on the unplowed road) left in my legs.
Acknowledgements
I got a huge amount of information from the online hiking community. I think that Stan was the first to mention that the logging road continues all the way to the LT, many others have written about it over the years. As noted above, I got a very informative response when I posted a query about that road, and both Bobandgeri and MichaelJ sent me valuable information. Much earlier docross had sent me a gpx file of his Mendon bushwhack, I found it helpful at some of the forks in the logging road, though we did our own navigation for the bushwhack. Frodo and Arm were both extremely helpful in sharing their experiences from the previous weekend.
