Trail support duty sounds cushy compared to hiking the Long Trail, but one Vermont day proved otherwise. A couple supporting their friend Rock Rabbit on day 32 of his thru-hike started with a gray-sky send-off near Notch Road, then filled the hours until his evening check-in with errands around Stowe. It did not go quietly.
First, a genuinely nice surprise: while scouting the road walk for hikers needing rides, they ran into another long-distance hiker they recognised from hostel stays on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia the previous summer. Small world, reassuring company — and that hiker was moving fast enough to potentially catch up with Rock Rabbit over Mansfield.
Then came the unplanned pleasures. A whim detour to the Ben and Jerry's factory near Waterbury paid off: they snagged the last two tour tickets of the day and found the complimentary sample portion far more generous than hiker gossip had suggested. Afterward, Smugglers Notch State Park came through with a choice of three campsites with private leantos, plus wifi. Grocery shopping at a nearby natural foods store yielded local spaetzle, fresh greens and a farm-raised pork loin — support-crew cooking at its finest.
Then things went sideways. The author's car door, on a slope, slammed shut on a finger: broken bone at the tip, a clean cut, another Vermont emergency room visit, a splint and nausea meds. That evening, camp staff warned about aggressively food-motivated bears that can open car doors, advised locking all food in the vehicle and offered an air horn on call. The horns turned out to be necessary. In the dark, the author's car door opened — and something unseen on the other side wrestled to hold it before letting go. Never saw the bear. Doesn't matter.
Still shivering from shock after the injury, the author folded: tent packed, two unused nights refunded, and a sympathetic motel clerk took pity on them with a reasonably priced room, clean beds, a kitchen and a bathroom. Up on the mountain, Rock Rabbit bedded down in Puffer Shelter at 3:37 pm — no tenting allowed there — sleeping warm in a new Zpacks-style down setup and Nemo Tensor pad as temperatures dipped into the 30s.
Why does this matter to travellers? It's a vivid, honest picture of Vermont's trail towns and state parks: the tours, the leantos, the bears that genuinely do open car doors. If you're driving to hike the Long Trail or simply basing yourself around Stowe, the practical lessons are real — stash food in the car and lock it, keep splint-worthy first aid handy, and know that Smugglers Notch State Park is a solid base with showers-adjacent civilization minutes away.
