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Vermont Semester
A 600 Mile Journey By Ski and Canoe (January-June 2004)

15 February, 2004

Dear friends, families, and interested members of the community,

Our first day this week began with a wake up call by Misha banging on the stovepipe in the big yurt. We woke up to freezing cold as the door stood open allowing the smoke pouring out of the stove to leave the inside of the yurt, where most of us had spent the night. The stovepipe was pulled apart and found to be full of creosote. The stove was cleaned out and the stove began working along with the rest of us. We packed and re-packed our backpacks, franticly tried to finish Main Lesson Pages (a portfolio of our most important lessons), cleaned and swept and tidied. All the dwellings were cleaned and emptied. Under a drizzly freezing rain we packed all our gear out into the van in the parking lot and drove halfway down the driveway only to turn around and lower the Earth Flag hanging limply between the remnants of the wood pile and the empty parking lot. Saul lowered the flag and tied it to the flagpole to await the re-habitation of Base Camp. We piled back into the van and drove to the recycling center; from there on to the starting point of the two-month ski section of our semester, the access road at the south end of Somerset Reservoir.

We pulled all our gear out of the van, and Annie (Kroka's Operations Director), took a few pictures of us out in the snow. We put on our skis and packs and headed out on the trail, just to be almost run over by snowmobiles. We skied three miles north on the wind-blown, snowmobile tamped ice of Somerset, and set camp in a slightly swampy area just off Somerset reservoir. We learned how to collect and lay fir boughs for the floor of the tent, find and cut firewood, and cook dinner.

That night, Jane got sick with a stomach bug, and so the next day was spent skiing around camp and visiting the Vermont Wilderness School apprentices who were camped nearby, while those that were sick stayed in the tent and slept all day.

The next day we headed back out on the trail and made 11 kilometers. At the end of the day we were all bushed and set camp in a swamp just off the trail. Early in the day we fell upon some excitement, when Emily found the only crevasse in Vermont and got stuck in it. The rest of the group came and got her out and no serious damage was done either to her or to the chasm.

The 4th day out on the trail (our third ski day) was spent mostly going down Dead Horse Hill, a very steep downhill trail that had not seen much snowmobile traffic. Most people also had gotten sick and were not feeling one hundred percent. Only Emily and Misha had not gotten sick. Everyone else had some sort of head cold or sickness. Nothing was very serious, but only a small portion of the group could cook because we wanted to reduce the risk of passing the cold along to those who had seemed to have avoided it.

On the 5th day out we ran into some interesting people after crossing Rt. 30 and walking up French Hollow Rd. A man named George and 6 women were snow shoeing along the trail and wanted to talk. They asked us many questions and had some slightly "different" ideas of what we needed on the trail ("You wanna come back to the house for a brewski"). The day was spent mostly on snowmobile tracks in the morning, where we took a slightly longer time than we had planned because we missed a turn off the main snowmobile track and had to go back. But we found our way, learned our lesson about looking at the maps, and bushwhacked for a bit before we made it to the road and the Catamount trail near the end of the day.

The 6th day was a 20-kilometer day, a good part of which was spent walking on the road to get to Bailey's for our first re-supply and layover. We could have taken a ride to their house, but our decision as a group was to stick it out and make it to our rest stop under our own power. It felt amazing to be welcomed to a beautiful house and have a wonderful dinner made for us.

Our first layover day was spent working on Main Lesson Pages, taking showers and getting all the work done that couldn't be done on the trail. It was wonderful to get clean and be able to be warm all day.

The first leg of the trip is complete, and it felt great to get to our first layover, but now it is time to put our skis back on and get back out into the wilderness.

Thank you to the Baileys for their wonderful hospitality and kindness, and for sharing the entirety of their house with us.

The Vermont Semester Program
Jane Larsen, scribe