Camping Leads to Hiking

Ah-ha! I'm honestly pretty proud of myself for remembering to post this week and not forgetting until next week :)

In late June last year a good friend (IAM), her father and I went camping at Emerald Lake State Park in Vermont. (For address, phone number and other information: http://www.vtstateparks.com/htm/emerald.htm). Honestly, I love camping - real camping where you learn to pitch tents and light fires - but the most camping my family did was in the back yard. Haha, the kind of camping where the kids run those orange extension cords out to the tent so they can watch TV or play Super Mario on the Nintendo when their parents are asleep back in the house. So anyways, yes this was camping out of your car but it was definitely camping. :)

Not too far away from the campsites, but it may take some more time to get from point A to point B as you go through Manchester, was Mt. Equinox (For address, phone number and other information: http://www.equinoxmountain.com/index.php). There is a gift shop at the base, and from what I gather a restaurant at the summit and on a usual day you can drive from one to the other after paying a toll at the gate. However, they had been doing some work on the building and some structures around the summit so we were told we wouldn't be able to drive completely to the summit - not wanting to loose out toll money they told us that there was an easy foot path that could take us from where we parked to the summit. 'Sounds good' we agreed, we paid our toll to the greedy toll machine, it lifted it's gate and we were on our way.

There are a couple places where you can stop along the way up, they have nice little look-outs and some have picnicking benches. But after a while we reached a point where there was a pull off to the right and a stop sign on a sawhorse in the middle of the road, we assumed that this was where out 'easy footpath to the summit' was so we pulled over and found our trail: the Red Trail.

I take a moment to pause here, if you have followed the link above, or if you are uncannily familiar with the trails at the summit of Mt. Equinox, you will know that this is not our 'easy footpath to the summit.' Nope, this is our (as per their trail map description) "expert 1.2 miles," angle-to-the-left trail. That line of rock that you see cutting through the center of the picture to the bottom right: that's the trail.

Which in all honesty it wasn't that bad, or that difficult of a trail, it's just that we were blindly expecting our 'easy footpath to the summit.' So we all had something easier and shorter in mind when, jean clad, we hopped out of the car ready to walk down the Red Trail. If you have decided to take a trip to Mt. Equinox, I would really encourage you to actually take this trail, just wear shoes with good tread, and clothes that you can move in. And if you are someone that isn't very limber or balanced I wouldn't suggest it, but if you think you can walk up crooked stairs well enough for about 20 minutes I think you could do it :)

Mt. Equinox's Red Trail puts you under the trees and right on the side of the mountain in a very cool way that lets you see both fauna and almost a treeline at the same time. Here I must admit that I have a fondness for finding and photographing mushrooms when hiking, and the Red Trail was full of them, I honestly felt like a kid in a candy store! But back to other things, it was honestly beautiful, the lighting that filtered down through the branches to illuminate the ground in spots was simply stunning. Seeing all of this natural beauty and stillness was definitely a gift from God that day; and definitely worth the surprise of the difficult trail.


The trail passed by some other trail heads and some pretty roasted looking coniferous trees, eventually coming to a lookout spot with a bench where you could look back towards Manchester with your back to the Mt. Equinox's summit.

When you move on again the trails kind of intermingle a little up here and flatten out. We finally wound our way back (in a U-turn from our lookout over Manchester) to the summit. While we were walking on these trails we encountered the most people and it seemed like all of them were coming towards us, finally when we got to the summit, and walked around the construction we saw that the parking lot was almost full - people had been driving around the stop sign that we diligently stopped at. So by obeying stop signs we got to take the beautiful 'expert' trail, and by driving around signs they got to take the swamped-from-construction 'short footpath,' I think we got the better bet.

Unfortunately because of the construction and obstructing trees you couldn't really get any good pictures of the view, but you could see that a good view was indeed offered in a couple directions; so I can't give you any actual Mt. Equinox summit pictures but I can tell you that the trip would be worth it.

On the way back to our car we decided to walk down the road, partly because we didn't know where a trail head was and partly because it would be quicker). It was a pretty steep downhill gradient in some parts, the kind that makes you wish you were a kid and it was a grassy hill so you could just log roll down it. The sky was clear so we could watch as some birds flew overhead, but it was by looking down that God gave us another delight: butterflies. They were everywhere on these purple plants and they stayed still long enough for me to take a few photos before we walked the rest of the way back to our lonely car (I guess no one else had decided to obey the stop sign).

I'm realizing at I type this that most of my hiking trips don't always turn out as planned.
Stay tuned for another fair weather post of a past trip,
G