Three days along N. America’s longest backcountry ski trail
Temperatures on a recent Vermont morning hinted, I thought, at the wisdom of staying indoors. In farm valleys framed by low peaks, frigid steam billowed from the surfaces of half-frozen rivers.
Frost bloomed across the roadway. In the colder hollows, the car’s outside thermostat registered 20 degrees below zero.
But reaching down past the passenger seat, I just shifted my plastic ski boots closer to the heater vent. In the back of the car was the bag I packed for a three-day, northbound journey along the longest backcountry ski trail in North America.
The 311-mile Catamount Trail runs north-south along the length of Vermont, following the rounded spine of the Green Mountains between Massachusetts and the Canadian border. Its 31 sections can be skied as individual day trips or linked up for a weeks-long, continuous journey that only a few hardy skiers have completed. I’d chosen the rolling terrain of Sections 13, 14 and 15 at the middle of the state, with plans to overnight in trail-side inns.
Despite bone-chilling temperatures, Vermont had received little snow by early January. While many ski resorts use machines to produce their own snow, backcountry skiing depends on ample quantities of the natural version.
“It’s very challenging,” said Catamount Trail creator Steve Bushey. Even the northernmost parts of New England get less snow than they did a few decades ago.
Bushey honed a love of adventure and navigation as a child, and on one October day in 1981, he found himself at home in Vermont after a crosscountry bicycle ride, staring at the snowy mountains.
“I thought, ‘One could ski the length of Vermont, because the snow comes early, it stays late and it piles up deep,’” he said. Bushey, who studied geography and cartography at the University of Vermont, began poring over maps, imagining a path that would link existing trail networks established by the state’s many cross-country ski centers.
At graduate school in Ottawa, Bushey was determined to create the long-distance ski trail as his master’s thesis. In March 1984, he asked two friends, Ben Rose and Paul
Jarris, to join him for the inaugural trip. “The ski trip itself was the final requirement for completing my thesis,” Bushey said.
A week before my own departure, a storm paused over Vermont’s mountains long enough to fill the woods with powder. Setting out from the trailhead with two companions, I wound northward through the tangle of purpose-built ski trails, footpaths, old logging roads and snowmobile trails that the Catamount Trail braids into a single route. The snow was cold enough to creak and shiver beneath my skis, and the yellow birch forest strained the morning sunshine into silvered lines of shadow.
Moving through the forest, I skied to the sounds of my quickened breath and heartbeat alone.
At a suggestion from Greg Maino, the communications and events director of the nonprofit Catamount Trail Association, we had climbed away from the main track for a scenic detour. After pausing for a brief lunch on a frozen log, we followed a section of the Long Trail — a 272mile hiking trail running the length of Vermont — into an especially lovely, rolling stretch of woods that the Trust for Public Land purchased for handover to the Agriculture Department-managed Green Mountain National Forest.
On its way across Vermont, the Catamount Trail crosses a diverse patchwork of federal, state and private land. Reroutes are common. The trail is a living corridor, twitching up and down slopes, flicking in and out of drainages.
“In the last few years, we’ve had a couple of changes where we’ve had to move the trail 50 yards or 100 yards just to make sure it’s on a different property line,” Maino said. He hopes the detour we followed will soon be official. With the added miles from our side trip, it was late afternoon when we joined the expansive network of cross-country trails managed by the Mountain Top Inn & Resort, where we planned to spend the night in a snug guesthouse overlooking the Chittenden Reservoir. The GPS device said we had traveled 11.2 miles.
For intrepid souls attempting a “through-ski,” accommodations are not so plush. One day along the trail in 2015, I met and skied alongside local outdoorsman Sam Brakeley, who was then midway through a 17-day, south-tonorth ski he’d later chronicle in his book “Skiing with Henry Knox: A Personal Journey Along Vermont’s Catamount Trail.” He was alone, carrying a lightweight backpacking tent and making a cold camp each night in the snow.
“The nights were the biggest challenge and the biggest surprise for me,” Brakeley said. “Nights in winter in Vermont are long — really long. It gets dark at 4:30 or 5 and doesn’t get light until 7:30. That’s a lot of time with subzero temperatures in the dark.”
That may be one reason so few skiers have attempted what Brakeley did. In 2020, 555 people registered through-hikes of the Long Trail. In contrast, the Catamount Trail Association has registered just 105 end-to-end ski trips in the nearly four decades since Bushey conceived the route. Most of these are by “section skiers” who completed the 31 sections gradually. Just a few dozen people have skied the trail in a continuous line, Maino estimates.
By midmorning on the second day of our ski journey, I had an inkling of another reason so few people have completed the Catamount Trail. That day’s 18-mile ski found me sweating despite the cold as I hopped over streams, clambered across fallen trees and scraped my skis on exposed brambles. A long-distance trail is a far cry from the curated conditions of a resort. Instead of wide-open runs, it invites travelers to measure out the landscape in hours, days or weeks spent on skis.
“It gives you a flavor for Vermont that is a totality, and it’s a very deep and rich flavor,” Bushey told me when I got back. “If you go to a single ski resort and spend two days there, it’s a very different experience. You begin and end in the same place, and your experience is limited.”
That deep, rich experience of Vermont left me thoroughly tired by the time my party reached the cross-country trails of Blueberry Hill Inn, where we would spend the second night. I knew from experience that a jar full of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies — the inn’s specialty — would be waiting there at the inn near Hogback Mountain.
In younger days, Britishborn innkeeper Tony Clark traveled to cross-country ski races around the world, and the inn’s outdoor center brims with racing memorabilia from Russia and Finland, as well as Norway’s famed Birkebeiner ski marathon.
Dark flurries enclosed the inn like a curtain that night, leaving a few inches of fresh powder to cushion our skis as we left the next morning. I led the way along the easygoing, 8mile romp toward our endpoint among the trails of the Rikert Nordic Center.
The first day out, I had noticed how quiet the woods seemed whenever our conversation lulled, but on the final stretch of trail, the forest was abuzz. Overhead, woodpeckers tapped into the dead wood of paper birches. Fresh snow revealed the perfect trail of a passing fox.
Then, nearing Rikert, we finally met tracks left by other skiers for the first time that day. Turning onto the center’s groomed trails, we crossed a meadow, then caught sight of our snow-covered car waiting in the far edge of the parking lot.
I leaned down to unbuckle my boots. When I took off my coat, steam rose from my shoulders. At our backs, the Catamount Trail slipped into afternoon shadow, gathering the forest close to its flanks as it continued northward and away.