Mansfield via Long Trail South

[chinooktrail]

My original plan was to try for Mansfield and Camel's Hump in one day, but we got off to a pretty late start, like noon, or later...

The trail started out great, uphill from the word go! I think we both needed this, as neither of us had done a lot of hiking lately. But here we were in the beautiful woods of Vermont. One of the first people we encountered was a gentleman who informed us that we were the 74th adn 75th people he had seen on the trail, wowser, popular place to be on this beautiful day.

We were cautioned that there was a LOT of snow, and the trail was slippery and so on many times over by the people hiking out. I was begining to worry about not bringing the snowshoes, but the people who were warning us were wearing sneakers... and most had no packs...

We were traveling on the Long Trail South from route 108, a very popular way to go apparently, which was interesting to see so many people out there. The trail is well marked, and a little muddy, but not too too bad, and there were a couple of patches of snow, but nothing hard to get over, no postholing, except when attempting to pelt your hiking partner with a few snowballs!

I thought this trail had a nice pace to it, nothing too steep, until you got past the junction with Profanity Trail. (For some reason we decided to stay FAR away from that one!) Then once you are out of the cover of the trees, it seems to get to be a little more like rock scrambeling, which was pretty fun!

There is one spot with a sort of short chimney section, and as I was looking for handholds or where to put my feet, I was thinking, hum, this will be fun to go down... This is the area where I started thinkin that this must be how it feels waiting for people on Everest, a steady flow of people were headed down, and I felt sort of salmon like, going against the stream. Once we got into an open spot, LenDawg must have been in a hurry to see the summit, because he turned it up a notch and off we went, zipping past othere hikers, cause I couldn't let him get ahead of me! Is there a leash law in Vermont?

We popped up onto the summit to a whole crowd of people, maybe 20 or 30, quickly we walked over the survey marker and found a nice spot for lunch away from the crowds. Ah, what views, even on this somewhat hazy day. We relaxed for a bit, watched a hawk playing in the breezes, had some snacks, and soaked up the Vermont skyline. Quite nice indeed.

Once we headed down, I did have a bit of a problem at the chimney spot, I just couldn't see where I was going, and I didn't much feel like doing a leap of faith, so I let LenDawg go first, handed over my pack, and scrambled down. I think if I were solo on this hike I would have thrown my pack down and tried it that way, not sure, and thanks to Lenny I didn't have to find out!

We took one quick wrong turn on the way down, because, ok, I will admit this, I was not thinking. I was just enjoying the hike. BUT, we did see some really neat large clusters of frog/tadpole jelly in a large mud puddle! After retracing our steps, we got onto the CORRECT trail and headed down, making our plans for Camels Hump...

 

[LenDawg]

Great T/R, Chinook. And don't forget, the L/T south runs one way while the L/T north runs a different way (j/k).

This was a great hike. I loved the rock scramble at the top. Fun time!

 

[blacknblue]

Glad you had a good time! The hike up the LT from Smuggs is one of my favorites; the scrambly part above the lodge is great. There are a lot of neat trails along the ridge between the Chin and the Forehead, especially the Canyon and Cliff Trails. But none of them quite have the cachet of the Wampahoofus Trail or the accuracy of Hell Brook Trail.