In the summer of 1900, Benton MacKaye set off to climb some of the tallest mountains in Vermont. As he put it: he took back roads, cart paths and bushwhacked through the woods. Six decades later he wrote about the journey to one of those summits.
“We walked up through the trail-less woods to the top of Stratton Mountain and climbed trees in order to see the view," MacKaye wrote. "It was a clear day, with a brisk breeze blowing. North and south, sharp peaks etched the horizon. I felt as if atop the world, with a sort of planetary feeling. I seemed to perceive peaks far southward, hidden by old Earth’s curvature. Would a footpath someday reach them from where I was then perched? Little did I dream.”
Benton MacKaye eventually set in motion the plan to build that footpath, decades later. It links Stratton Mountain to the faraway peaks he saw that day, and quite a ways past that, too.
“It served as an inspiration for him to imagine a trail that could ride the ridge crest and the summits of the entirety of the Appalachians," said Hawk Metheny with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
“And he envisioned the idea of an Appalachian Trail … where people could recreate and be connected with the land and connected with nature. And with one another, you know, as a trail society, in some ways.”
Today thousands of people a year try to hike all 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail — but only about a quarter of them make it the whole way.
And the trail has morphed in the years since it was built. Stratton Mountain is now the home of a ski resort. WSHU's Davis Dunavin took a gondola to the top of the mountain with Ilana Copel of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. A fire tower stands at the top. Hikers line up to climb it and see the view.
“This is one of the busiest spots in Southern Vermont," Copel said. "We have the Appalachian Trail and the Long Trail running in tandem, so there’s Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, there’s Long Trail thru-hikers. And also it's just pretty close to some major population centers like Boston, if someone wants to do a fun hike in Vermont.”
Ilana and Dunavin climb the fire tower and look out from a little room on top. We get rewarded with a gorgeous panorama.
“We're looking at a sweeping view of Southern Vermont," she said. "So we can see the Taconic Mountains in Vermont, we can see the White Mountains in New Hampshire. If it was a little more clear, we could see Massachusetts, but most of what we're seeing is the Green Mountain National Forest. A lot of trees, a lot of pretty lakes. The Appalachian Trail and the Long Trail kind of span everything we can see right now.”
Some of Benton MacKaye’s vision was never realized. He fantasized about small communities along the trail — almost like rustic wilderness survival schools tucked up in the mountains.
“This idea of these camps where people would come and learn skills, like traditional kind of woods skills, in an educational environment, and be able to stay and work there. And the trail would connect these locations,” Hawk Metheny said.
Benton MacKaye didn’t get everything he wanted. But you can still climb to the top of Stratton Mountain and many other mountains along the trail — and feel what Benton called that planetary feeling — as if you’re literally on top of the world.
