HUNTINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Your next hike up Camel’s Hump might look and feel a little different after trail upgrades there.
The Burrows Trail is one of the state’s most popular hiking spots, no matter the time of year.
“It’s kind of the apex of Vermont hiking,” said Keegan Tierney, the director of field programs with the Green Mountain Club. “We have tens of thousands of folks that access the mountain via this path every year.”
It accesses the second-highest peak in the Green Mountains.
“It needed a lot of work and it’s always going to need work. And that’s the reality with hiking and biking trails is they always need maintenance,” Tierney said.
After 70 weeks of work spanning across three years, the Green Mountain Club completed a top-to-bottom rehabilitation project on the Burrows Trail. Thanks to federal funds, it’s the largest trail work project of its kind in modern Vermont history.
“The great majority of the work that we did out here is stonework, and folks aren’t going to see most of it because it’s actually buried under the trail,” Tierney said.
But there are some changes you can see. Crews closed off a nearly 100-year-old path and moved the trail to a more sustainable path.
“It’s a steep trail, so water wants to go directly down because it’s the easiest way for water to go. And when it was built 100-something years ago, they chose the most direct way up,” said Grace Law, the northern crew lead for the Green Mountain Club.
Over the summer, Law led the crew that spent weeks improving the trail. She points to wooden steps as one of the visible changes along the trail.
“One of the rules with trail building is if it’s above a 10% grade, then you want to do some kind of structure,” Law said.
But building stone steps takes a lot of work, most of it by hand.
“People generally look at the staircases and hopefully think like, wow, it’s crazy that this naturally happens and it never naturally happens. It takes about, usually, a week, a week and a half, to, like, build a staircase at a stone and that’s like, maybe six steps,” Law said.
All done with the goal of helping the mountain and those who hike it.
“Just making an easier way that people aren’t going to slip downhill and that water won’t rush right down,” Law said.
The Green Mountain Club says if you see things stacked along a trail, they were most likely put there on purpose, so they ask that you leave them there and continue on the trail.