Five days, roughly 60 miles, one welcome hotel night and a chance reunion in the woods — a thru-hiker's latest dispatch from the Long Trail offers a candid look at what an autumn section of America's oldest long-distance footpath actually feels like.
The stretch begins above Stratton Pond and rolls into Manchester Center, Vermont, a classic hiker town. With cold rain forecast, the writer and their partner grabbed a hotel room, then scored an unexpected bonus: trail magic (hotdogs, chips, soda and cookies) from Green Mountain Club volunteers at a road crossing. A recurring theme in these trail journals is hiker culture — meeting friends like Swamp Witch, trading Alaska stories over hotel breakfast, and chatting with day hikers astonished at how light an end-to-end pack can be.
Day 72 was a 'zero' — zero miles hiked. It rained hard, so the pair did what thru-hikers do best: ate. Lunch was a pound of cottage cheese and half a party-size bag of chips; dinner featured half a pound of turkey sandwiches and Vermont hard cheddar, washed down with sorbet. The writer reckons they've actually gained weight on this hike.
Back on trail, the days stack up Vermont's signature terrain: slick bog boards, roots, mud and rocky scrambles over Bromley, Styles, Peru and Baker peaks — with Baker sitting in a cloud so thick the trees below vanished. Hitchhiking back to the trailhead worked, courtesy of a kind couple outside a McDonald's. Later, an impromptu camp near Big Branch Creek turned into a social night at Minerva Hinchey Shelter with nine other hikers, before a final 18.5-mile push with a long but never brutal climb up Killington Mountain, positioning the hikers for a Rutland resupply.
For anyone eyeing the Long Trail, this is a useful window into the rhythm of the route. The trail shares its southern miles with the Appalachian Trail before splitting north — a milestone the writer is genuinely excited about, since the northern half is new ground for them. Manchester Center and Rutland make practical town stops, with full-service groceries, budget-friendly chain hotels and the classic resupply ritual of repackaging food. The trail's enclosed shelters with wood stoves are a genuinely Vermont feature, though the instructions warn to shut the windows at night — porcupines have a taste for salt-caked gear.
Timing matters. Early autumn brings chilly nights in the 30s and 40s Fahrenheit, cold rain, and the need for a proper quilt or sleeping bag — but also quiet trails, established hiker communities, and the kind of spontaneous trail magic that makes the whole slog worthwhile. It's an honest, unglamorous portrait of long-distance hiking: hitchhikes, soggy zeros, and miles that look worse in the guidebook than they are on the ground.
