In true weekend warrior fashion, we booked a room last minute in Waitsfield during peak leaf-peeping season and left at 6am Saturday morning to beat the traffic heading north for our impromptu autumnal ‘Tour du Vert Mont’. Appropriately, we stopped at Drop-In Brewing in Middlebury before some boozy apple picking just down the road at Happy Valley Orchards. We ate lunch by the creek and found our way to our little ski lodge near Sugarbush Resort.
Waking up just as early the next day, we parked at Lincoln Gap and hit the Long Trail going north for a short, brisk 2.4 miles to the summit of Abraham - a very popular day hike and for good reason. It was a steep segment of trail, but the morning light peering through the trees and the creeping winter frost kept us moving. After a final push up the rock slab to the summit, we were greeted with incredible panoramic views from the top. Fire orange, deep rust reds, and golden yellows rustled through the trees overlooking the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain to the west; Green Mountain National Forest to the south; the Whites to the east; and the Canadian border to the north. I sat atop the summit in a rock circle for a while before the chill set in once again, I threw on my puffy, and continued north while my partner rested before making his way back down.
It’s a relatively flat (for northern Long Trail standards anyway) 3.3 or so miles on a ridge to Ellen, which shares its summit with Sugarbush as a ski slope. I was a bit pressed for time with dinner reservations at a brewery for 6pm, so with the wind behind me, I hurried along back under tree line in search of a glimpse at the remnants of a plane crash from the early 70s. After that, it was smooth sailing over Little Abe and Lincoln Peak before the trees opened once again and the ski lift lined the mountain. I snapped a quick photo, thanked Ellen for a picture-perfect moment, and headed back toward Abe.
The way back simply always feels longer - maybe it’s the fatigue, perhaps the wistful sadness of returning home after an adventure, but rambling down the way we came seemed an eternity. With aching knees, we found the truck, happy to have started when we did as cars from all down the eastern seaboard (and even some from the western one) dotted the dirt road up to the trailhead. My biggest peak-bagging day clocking in at 11.2 miles, wrapped up with beer cheese nachos and a (Lawson’s) Sip of Sunshine.
NH 0/48
New England 3 and 4/67
New England 3 and 4/100 Highest
Northeast 4 and 5/115
