Sadie
New member
With 2 little ones and a diabetic dog to care for, it takes all the stars aligning just perfect for us to hit the trails. It takes a lot of planning! In a few years we’ll start bringing the little ones, but at age 19 months +3 not yet! We planned this weekend trip to Stowe for Mansfield hiking back in early August, and given the rainy summer we had worried that even if the stars were properly aligned for dependent care, the weather may not agree. However it all amazingly came together just fantastically and we couldn’t have had better weather! We stayed in Stowe village Friday night, took advantage of being without kids or dog, slept in and then set out to hit the trail. We had a minor snag when we ran into the road being closed for the Stowe Oktoberfest parade, but stopped and enjoyed a fun old fashioned parade with a school marching band, Oompah band, Miss VT and fire trucks. We then made our way to the Long Trail parking area off of Mountain Road. We walked along Mt road south to the ski area (very short walk) looking for the Hasleton trail. We walked along the lower ski trail for a while and totally missed the entrance to the Hasleton Trail and finally figured it out when we went past several chair lift bases and then backtracked looking for the trail more carefully. We were expecting a ski trail sized entrance to the trail, but in reality it is small wooded trail entrance that was camouflaged with some sagging tree branches— there is a sign with and arrow (earlier we poorly interpreted the sign that the start was further down, but the arrow actually points directly to the trail start). It is a nice steady trail with good footing all the way up. The toughest part was just below the auto road intersection where it goes up a black diamond ski trail where it was grass with gravely rock. When we reached the auto road, we met with a person who was directing cars up to the top—it was so busy up top he needed to turn cars away or ask them to wait at lower parking area! There was also a small rustic cabin (locked) that apparently is lotteried for skiers to use in the winter—serious trail side accommodations! We walked up the auto road to the summit parking lot. There was a small visitor center, lots of cars. We continued on the long trail towards the Chin. There were so many people up there, it was like a regular traffic jam. Weather was fantastic, about 65 degrees, sunny, not windy and nearly unlimited views of the fabulous foliage! We kept moving through the crowds and after a nice long stunning ridge walk made it to the Chin. There must have been 100-200 people up there. We paused at the Chin a bit and then moved down towards the Long Trail to head to the car. The upper 0.3 mi from the Chin to the Adam’s apple spur is very steep and was a lot of sitting on bum and slowly lowering myself down. A few places were a bit scary going down. I would recommend going up the Long Trail and down Hasleton instead of what we did because of some of the difficult climbing (I think it was worse going down) near the upper section of the Long Trail just below the summit. We stopped off to check out the Taft lodge on the way down—nice cabin that had great view, lots of room inside for backpackers and even a porch with a rocking chair. As we headed down, we still saw lots of casual dayhikers still heading up—it just didn’t seem like they would have enough time to go up and down before dark, maybe they were planning to take the gondola down. The entire trip took us about 6 h including missing the Hasleton trail entrance and lots of time to enjoy the views. Great hike, but the crowds definitely took away from it a bit—it was such a perfect Fall day and with an autoroad and gondola to the top, I guess we should expect to see a lot of people out on the tallest mountain in VT during leaf peeping season. Definitely a beautiful peak and a perfect day out! This was #51/67 NE 4KER for me.
