While my sister Amy went along with the girls to shop in Burlington (aka "the largest city in Vermont at 40,000) brother-in-law Ryan got suckered into another crazy hike with me. We (um, yeah, it was really just me) chose Camel's Hump as our destination. It's the third or fourth highest peak in Vermont which sounds really impressive until you realize that none of the peaks top 5,000 feet. Camel's Hump tops out around 4,100 feet, in fact, so there'd be no need for oxygen this time around.

We chose to climb from the Duxbury side which meant we were looking at about 2,000 feet of gain. I had scoped out a series of hikes that would have had more distance and elevation gain, but my feet were still in bad shape after my Dutch Miller adventure and I thought I'd try to repair my reputation with Ryan after taking him on a 15 mile death march at the last family wedding. This route (a lollipop including the Dean, Monroe, and Long Trail) would take us to the summit with about 7.6 miles of distance. Not too bad for a warm Monday afternoon.

The weather was actually really good with dry air in the mid seventies. This was a great relief after the oppressive humidity and thundershowers of the previous few days.

We started late, but found only a few people at the trailhead. I had been worrying we'd see something like Mt. Si crowds, but then I remembered it was Monday and there were only some 600,000 people in the entire state anyway. We signed in and started up the meandering woodland trail.

In a mile or so we came to an intersection with the Dean and Monroe trails. Dean headed left (appropriate, huh?) while Monroe spun off to the right. We planned to follow the Dean to the Long Trail, summit, then come back on Monroe. The trails were well signed (it was a State Park after all) which was a nice change from the usual trouble I get in looking for "that trail that's the third trail on the left after the dry creek past the old tree."

The Dean trail climbed south over a creek ("brook" in the Northeast) and past a couple of ponds full of tadpoles. Looking across one we could see Camel's Hump in the distance looking awfully high and awfully far away. Onward!

We soon intersected the Long Trail which is sort of like a PCT for Vermont. Unlike the PCT, though, the Long Trail summits every peak it comes across which makes for a rollercoaster experience. Did the PCT builders decide against this or was it just impractical to summit the much higher peaks in the west? Dunno.

The Long Trail builders clearly didn't have much experience with switchbacks. As in New Zealand, when the trail needed to go up it just did. No pretense about making it accessible to someone who didn't want to scramble up sheer rocks, just climb. The route was marked with white blazes painted on the trees and, when there were no trees, the rocks. It was kind of like following the fog line down the highway. Stay along the white marks and you'll be ok.

As long as you avoid the snakes.

Yeah, well, it was probably a little gardner snake, but not knowing anything about the eastern snakes we decided to throw sticks. Nothing. So we we went around to find the snake was no longer blocking the trail. Blast. It was probably following us now.

The trail turned into rough-hewn steps as we continued to climb around the western edge of the Hump. Up, up, up. Ugh. And always above us the nearly vertical cliffs loomed promising at least a brutal scramble if nothing else.

We broke out of the trees and were greeted by signs telling us to stay on the path and not mess with the alpine vegetation. It was remarkedly similar to the kind of vegetation we'd see above 6,000 feet in the west, but there it was at 4,000 feet. Go figure.

The last section was climbing on smooth rocks watching the forested peaks of Vermont stretching away in all directions. At the top there were indeed a bundle of other people lounging in the sun. We had 360 degree views with no obstructions. We could see Sugarbush (where we were staying) to the south, Mt. Mansfield (the highest peak in Vermont) to the north, and the Burlington airport and Lake Champlain to the west.

The trail down wasn't terribly different from the trip up except it was much less severe in terms of its pitches. There were no wacky scrambles, just a few careful decents. We turned on to the Monroe trail, passed a work crew talking about when they had recently protested the war, and were soon back at the parking lot.

The Monroe trail was a lot easier, but had none of the vistas we had seen on the Dean and Long Trails. It did, however, have a beautiful creek sparkling under the filtered sunlight. We signed out and saw that most of the climbers this day were from out of state making me wonder if Vermonters took advantage of the cool little climbs they had right around the corner.