The Long Trail is the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States. It runs two hundred and seventy-three miles along the spine of the Green Mountains from the Massachusetts line to the Canadian border. It was completed in 1930. It is maintained by the Green Mountain Club, a volunteer organisation founded in 1910.
Each spring, the higher sections of the trail are closed by the GMC for what is known locally as mud season. The closure typically runs from mid-April to Memorial Day weekend. Its purpose is the protection of trail beds that, when walked in saturated condition, do not recover for several years.
In 2026 the closure ran from April 15 to May 23. On the morning of May 24 the trails reopened. That morning, a volunteer trail steward named Jen Pelletier walked her assigned section, a five-mile stretch from Brandon Gap north over Mount Horrid to the Sucker Brook Shelter.
Pelletier has been a Long Trail volunteer steward since 2018. She lives in Middlebury and works as a high school biology teacher. Her section is one of forty-four into which the trail is divided for stewardship.
She arrived at the Brandon Gap parking lot at 0700 with a daypack, a folding pruning saw, a pair of bypass loppers, a sack of trail tags, and a clipboard. The temperature was eight degrees Celsius. The forecast was for partial sun and no rain.
Her work on the opening-day walk has three parts. She walks the trail and notes its condition. She removes small blowdowns and clips back encroaching brush. She replaces or refurbishes the small white-paint blazes that mark the route.
The first half-mile north of Brandon Gap climbs steeply through a hardwood forest of beech and yellow birch. The trail bed here is bare ledge and large rocks. Mud is not an issue. Pelletier walked the half-mile in eighteen minutes and reached the cliffs above the gap with the trail in as good a condition as she had ever seen it in May.
From the cliffs the trail traverses Mount Horrid. The summit at twelve hundred metres is unremarkable. The cliffs below it are a peregrine falcon nesting site, closed seasonally to climbers from March 15 to August 1. Pelletier checked the signage at the climbers' approach and replaced one weathered sign with a fresh one from her pack.
The descent from Horrid into the saddle before Cape Lookoff Mountain is the section Pelletier was most concerned about. The trail here passes through a small bog on its way down. The bog is crossed by a series of split-cedar puncheons that the GMC trail crew installed in 2014 and reset in 2021.
She found three of the puncheons displaced, one of them lifted six inches off its support by frost heave. She made notes on her clipboard. The repair was beyond what she could do alone with hand tools. She would file the work order with the regional trail-crew leader that evening.
On either side of the displaced puncheon the trail bed was soft. There were boot prints in the mud, recent. Pelletier estimated they had been made within the previous forty-eight hours, before the official opening. She made a note of this also.
Mud-season violations are a chronic issue on the Long Trail. The GMC publishes the closure widely. The trailhead signs are explicit. There is, nevertheless, a small population of walkers who treat the closure as advisory. The damage from a single walker on a saturated trail bed can take three years of natural recovery and a season of crew work to repair.
Pelletier does not confront violators when she encounters them. She has done so once, in 2020, and the encounter went badly. She now relies on signage and on the slow education of the hiking culture.
From the saddle the trail climbs Cape Lookoff and then descends gradually to the Sucker Brook Shelter. The shelter is a three-sided log lean-to built by the GMC in 1963 and reroofed in 2019. Pelletier reached it at 1130.
She swept the shelter, checked the logbook, and inspected the privy. The logbook had no entries since October 2025. The privy was in good order. The maul and the bag of woodchips were stored where she had left them in November.
She ate a sandwich on the shelter platform. She read the logbook entries from the previous summer. There were thirty-eight, most of them brief, most of them from northbound Long Trail through-hikers. The longest entry was from a walker named Mira who had spent two nights at the shelter in August during a thunderstorm and had used her time to draw the surrounding trees in pencil.
Pelletier signed the logbook with the date and her steward number. She added a short note: Trail open as of today. Puncheons in saddle need crew attention. Spring is dry so far.
She walked back to Brandon Gap by the same route. She was at her truck by two. The total day had been seven hours and ten miles. She had removed three small blowdowns, refreshed two blazes, replaced one sign, and made fourteen entries on her clipboard.
She drove home to Middlebury. She filed her work-order email at six in the evening. She made dinner. She marked papers until ten.
Her next stewardship walk was scheduled for June 14. She expected to find the trail busier. She expected the puncheons in the saddle to still be displaced. She would, she said, take photographs.
