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Moving Onward and Upward

© Lisa Marie Pane

There are places in our lives that just instinctually feel like home. For me, those spots are few and far between, but one place that has always held me in its grasp, captivated me, spoken to me on levels that can't be put into words is Vermont.

I lived there only briefly _ two years in the 1980s in Brattleboro _ and rented a ski house in the shadows of Mount Snow with friends every year for nearly a decade in the 1990s. But the deepest link goes back generations. It is my ancestors who were among the earliest settlers of the Green Mountain State, staking a claim as dairy farmers in a region that once boasted more cows than people. It is perhaps those family ties that bind me to Vermont.

Oddly, in the years I lived and played in Vermont, the only times I ventured into the mountains were to take a ski lift to the top and schuss down. I never headed up into the hills by foot, and hadn't even known about this hobby of peakbagging until my years living there were long over.

And that is why I was perhaps most pleased that with the completion of the New Hampshire 4,000 footers, I now am able to turn my sights toward Vermont _ home to five 4Ks.

It was October, the height of leaf-peeping season, when MichaelJ and AMSTony and I got a chance to head to Camel's Hump (4,083 feet).

Vermont has a different feel than New Hampshire in the valley _ as well as in the mountains. While New Hampshire's trails are apt to be rocky, steep and filled with plenty of obstacles along the way, Vermont's are a comparative breeze. They sport broad, relatively rock-free paths and gentle slopes. They are largely beneath tree cover until the very top.

Vermont is deserving of the Green Mountain nickname while New Hampshire has certainly earned its White Mountain moniker.

It was a beautiful fall day when we took off up the Monroe Trail, part of the famed Long Trail that cuts its way from the Canadian border and vertically down to the Massachusetts border through Vermont. The southern portions share its trail with the Appalachian.

The signs of fall were all around us: leaves of a golden, reddish hue. Birch trees sprang out here and there, and I couldn't help but think of my grandmother who loved to paint landscape pictures featuring these trees. She wasn't much to head out into the wild. Instead, she would take my grandfather's catch from the Battenkill or the animal he'd bagged by shotgun or trap, and turn it into a nice Yankee feast.