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

10 March, 2004

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

After Chris, Ashirah and Miron left and we became a smaller group again, we settled in and laid out our sleeping bags on the floor of the ski barn at Blueberry Hill for resupply number two.

The next day was a rush of work. People seemed to fly in and out all day with lessons to share with us. Greg Sharrow came and spoke to us about interviewing people, and Bruce Brown came and spoke to us about the Moosalamoo Association.

After a day of main lesson pages and lessons from the outside world we moved back into the upstairs of the Ski Barn (where we had been sleeping and doing much of our work) to partake in "Italian Night", a dinner prepared for us and others by the Blueberry Hill staff, which some of us ate off paper plates with plastic utensils. It felt strange not to have our enamel bowls and wooden spoons that we have all grown so accustom to. The food was really good though, and we had the leftover dessert for breakfast the next morning because we were so full. That night, as we settled into our sleeping bags, more than a few of us complained of how much our stomachs hurt from being overly full. The painful luxury of not carrying your food on your back.

The next day was again a rush of work. We spent a few hours clearing shrubs off Blueberry Hill land to repay for our accomadations, Susan Keese from VPR came and spoke with us, and the math tutor came and we again stretched our minds in new directions. That evening we packed our backpacks for the next morning, prepared to get out on the trail early, and settled into our sleeping bags, grateful we wouldn¹t have to worry about drying them the next morning.

An early wake up and we all took our pre-packed packs outside. Then we cleaned the ski barn from top to bottom. That morning we would start two days of dogsledding with three local mushers, so while we waited for Lissy, Ed, CJ, and their dogs to arrive we laid our maps for the section we were about to embark upon on the floor of the ski barn and caught a glimpse of what lay ahead. Then Lissy, CJ, and Ed all showed up with the dogs and those of us that were dog sledding, Em, Mathias, Chris and Saul, started a one kilometer road walk from Blueberry Hill to where the dogs were waiting. The rest of us headed across the road, through the Blueberry Hill trails, and off, again following the little blue plastic "omens" that say "Catamount X-C Ski Trail" across them. The dogs got to camp before the skiers (surprise!) and the dogsledders picked a campsite and started to set camp while two of the dog teams came back and picked up more skiers and took all our packs. I hopped on a sled with CJ, while Joe and Stefan stood on the back of Lissy¹s sled. Evan and Misha skied to camp. That night Ed, Lissy, and CJ told us about themselves, how they became interested in dog sledding, and what else they did for work (hi to CJ¹s class!).

The next day Stefan, Joe, Evan and I prepared to set out with the dogsleds while everyone else packed camp. We went for about 6 kilometers by dogsleds, by far the fastest six kilometers of the trip. At that point the skiers began a road walk and, after a brief goodbye circle, the dogs turned around and headed back to where their trucks were parked. From the road walk through a series of fields we caught a brief glimpse of Lincoln Gap, and beyond that Mount Abraham, the shoulder of which we would camp on After a series of skis and short road walks we veered towards camp off Lincon Gap Road. We headed down into a little valley for camp and on a small hill coming into camp I fell and partially tore a ligament in my left knee. (This next paragraph is written by Saul because I spent a day off the trail, resting and eating four kinds of ice cream.)

The journey up Mt. Abraham was some of the highest adventure yet. Ever since we looked at the maps and saw the 2000¹ climb that waited for us, I was looking forward to the challenge, our first task of mountaineering. As we climbed the remainder of the unplowed road to Lincoln gap two people came flying down, one head first, on sleds. It was about then that we took off our skis because the snow was too icy for our fish scales to grip. Once we reached Lincoln Gap we continued on foot up the Long Trail. We tied our skis behind our packs so that they wouldn¹t catch on low laying branches. As we climbed the forests changed from hardwoods to conifers and then the trees got smaller and smaller, the views bigger and bigger. It was so warm on the south side of the mountain that we were all in t-shirts. As we climbed I kept thinking our group was too small and kept looking for someone behind us.

Reaching the top was awesome. We were able to see the whole landscape from the Connecticut to Lake Champlain. We could see where we had come from and where we were going. It was exhilarating. We could also see a storm coming in from the south. Continuing on to Lincoln Peak, the going was slow because the snow was so deep we were skiing through the tree tops. After one kilometer and an hour of bushwhacking, we decided to descend the slopes of Sugarbush and head for the valley. We must have been quite a spectacle on the slopes and many people stopped to look or to ask where we were headed. We finished the day with a road walk to what Joe christened the cheesy swamp, where we camped. The storm hit with rain after we had set camp and we spent a night wondering how Jane was fairing. The next morning, Misha and I, Saul, skied out to meet Jane in a light rain.

While they were out climbing Mt. Abe, I was taken, along with Mathias, by Robert Turner Em¹s dad, to the emergency room at Porter Hospital where we sat in the waiting room for about 2 hours. I went in and had my knee yanked and poked by a doctor, who then told me I had a partially torn MCL, and to treat it like a sprain: rest, ice, compression, and elevation. We then went to the co-op got some apples and bread so that Mathias and I didn¹t eat all the Turner¹s food, and then went to the Turner¹s house, had an amazingly good dinner, and delicious dessert of apple. I went upstairs and sat on Em¹s bed and wrote in my journal of the day, and wondered how the rest of the group was doing and how their day had gone.

I met with the group again at the parking lot of the Sugarbush Inn. Saul was sitting on the steps under a pine tree out of the rain, waiting for us, and Misha came out a minute later. Mathias took his pack, Saul took mine and we headed to the Cheesy swamp to camp. The snow was melting out on the swamp in the rain, and we all took baths in the stream the next day, which was really warm. The 2nd of March was our layover day and we spent the day patching, repairing, cleaning ourselves and our clothes, and finishing work.

The next day was a lot of wet, melting snow and road walk. We headed out walking to get to Battleground condominiums so that I could pick up skins and snowshoes to make travel easier on my knee. Then we got up into the mountains and the snow began to fall ever so slightly. Conditions were right at our campsite, and we cut snow blocks to make a snow wall around our tent and an igloo. I slept out in the igloo with Em and Evan. It was a cozy little place to sleep.

Then we headed out down from our camp on Hemlock Hill. The day was almost all downhill in the morning. Joe was carrying a red torpedo sled that we had found along the side of the trail, and rode down the hills on that. We had a bit of a detour that day when we started traversing on the Catamount Trail to cut off a kilometer, but it didn¹t feel right to Em who was leader for the day, so we turned around and went back on the snowmobile trail for the rest of the day. It got a bit patchy in places, but we skied the whole way, narrowly missing icy, muddy, rocky patches and found some Root Beer Barrels (still in their wrappers) which were really tasty, along with some Dorrito type chips. At the end of the day we came to a beautiful place to camp, an open field that had on old falling down house in it, with huge sugar maples lining the old farm road winding past it truly a thrilling site: a glimpse of a 100-year-old Vermont landscape. We decided that it was warm, so we slept outside and set up a tripod fire to cook over. Em, Saul, Misha, and Mathias all slept out under a huge pine in the middle of the field. Everyone else stayed in the tent, which we set up in the dark because it was starting to rain. We set no boughs and didn¹t set the stove. We found that you can cook biscuits the same way you can toast marshmallows over an open fire, by roasting them.

Friday, March 5th , Ted Milks, the director of the Catamount Trail came and visited us on the trail, and had lunch with us. It was fun to talk to someone about what we were doing and what was happening with the trail we have been and will be living on.

We layed over the next day and practiced first aid scenarios. We first practiced building sleds to evacuate a victim on. Then, with Mathias as our patient, we practiced a scenario of finding and treating him and his injuries. We got him loaded onto our sled and back to camp, but the sled fell apart in the process, so we decided that we needed to do a bit more first aid work.

Then we traveled on one day to Bolton Lodge which we thought was going to be a 20 kilometer day, but as we were unexpectedly given the opportunity to cross over the Winooski river on our skis, it turned out to be only about 16 kilometers. Crossing over the ice of the Winooski, which was run over with 4-6 inches of flowing water, wasŠ interesting. After crossing without incident we then walked across a series of fields and did a long road walk to Bolton access road, stopping once at a gas station to support our local cows in the flavors of Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch, and Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. From there we skied up to Bolton Lodge, a small cabin which we cleaned up and stayed in for a night. We then decided as a group that we couldn¹t get all our academic work done in the cabin and so we rented a hotel room at Bolton Inn, and are doing our academic work here. While the unexpected transition back into a different lifestyle has been a challenge for many of us, we are all plugging away at our Main Lesson Pages, resting, and rewinding the spring so we can surge into the next stretch with the excitement we all feel.

That is the basic schedule of what we did on the trail in the last section. We have a set schedule and we travel every day. We move in a rhythm, and have found a pattern to the way we live. This leg was spent working on efficiency, and we have each started taking on a position we call "leader for the day" in which the community looks to us for leadership, and less to Misha and Mathias. Hopefully we are growing faster and better and stronger and more full of awe of the world around us, and will continue to do so in the next section.

The Vermont Semester Program
Jane Larsen, scribe