The Charles P. Cooper Memorial Lodge, a stone-and-wood shelter built in 1939 near the summit of Killington Peak, is the highest shelter on the Long Trail. It stands at roughly 3,850 feet elevation, 100 feet downhill from the Killington spur junction, on a site where Vermonters have been seeking shelter on that windswept ridge for well over a century.
The Site Before the Lodge
The history of this site is older than the lodge itself, older even than the Long Trail. In 1879, the citizens of Rutland raised money to build a carriage road up the western face of Killington, and the following summer Vincent C. Meyerhoffer opened a hotel just below the summit. The Killington House, as it was known, was no rustic lean-to: an 1886 county history described "a substantial frame hotel with rooms for 30 or 40 guests," complete with stables, sheds, and outbuildings. Rutlanders made the ten-mile journey by night to catch sunrises from the peak; poet Julia C. R. Dorr captured the vertigo of standing above it in 1880, describing "billow after billow, like the waves of the ocean — not billows of clouds, but the everlasting hills themselves, all tremulous with the purple and golden mists of sunset."
The hotel’s fortunes turned with the automobile age. Meyerhoffer sold the property to M. E. Wheeler of Rutland in 1901 for $2,000, and business steadily declined. The hotel trade on Killington was finished by about 1910, and the buildings fell to porcupines, picnickers, and weather. Some accounts say a fire finished them off around 1915 or 1916.
It was the ruinous state of those old hotel remains that greeted James P. Taylor in 1908, when he led a group of schoolboys up the washed-out carriage road and spent a miserable night in what was left of the hotel kitchen. His experience on that trip — and on Stratton Mountain the following summer, where he sat in the mist bemoaning the lack of trails in Vermont — helped inspire him to propose a footpath connecting the Green Mountain summits. On March 11, 1910, the Green Mountain Club was formed to build and maintain what would become the Long Trail.
As the trail took shape, the GMC addressed the lack of shelter near Killington’s summit. Around 1915, the Club erected a round metal shelter near the site of the old hotel. In 1926, a stone structure known as the "Porky Shelter" followed. Both eventually succumbed to the same forces that had done in Meyerhoffer’s hotel — weather, porcupines, and time.
Charles P. Cooper
The lodge takes its name from Charles Paine Cooper, one of the Green Mountain Club’s foundational figures. Born in Michigan on January 10, 1868, Cooper spent his early years moving across the Midwest with his family before settling in Rutland, Vermont, by 1907. He worked as silo manager for the Creamery Package Manufacturing Company and threw himself into civic life — Rutland Rotary, the Chamber of Commerce, the Playground Committee, the Congregational Church, the Vermont Boy Scout Council, and years on the Board of Aldermen.
But it was on the trail that Cooper made his most lasting mark. He joined the Green Mountain Club in its early years, served as vice-president, and became the Club’s third president in 1917, holding that office until he moved back to the Midwest in December 1925. During those years a considerable portion of the Long Trail was built. Cooper was not merely an administrator: he was a working trail-builder, described in the 1985 book Green Mountain Adventure as "the painter of signs whose paint-spattered jacket was known the length of the trail." The 1920 edition of the Long Trail guidebook contains a fold-out map of the trail penned in Cooper’s own hand.
Cooper died on March 15, 1936, at 68, while hiking with his daughter Frances near Maywood, Illinois — still on a trail, still in the mountains he loved. Within three years, the Club would name its highest shelter in his memory.
Construction
The land on which the lodge stands was owned by Mortimer R. Proctor of Proctor, Vermont. Proctor had purchased the Killington summit tract from Wheeler in 1919 and in 1938 donated it to the State of Vermont, emphasizing its value for scenic and natural preservation and public access. Proctor was himself a former president of the Green Mountain Club and would go on to serve as Vermont’s lieutenant governor and, from 1945 to 1947, its governor.
Building operations began in the summer of 1938, carried out by members of the Plymouth Civilian Conservation Corps camp under the direction of the Vermont State Forestry Department, in cooperation with a GMC committee headed by Cola J. Cleveland of Rutland. A hurricane struck Vermont in September 1938 and halted work; construction resumed the following year and was completed in the summer and fall of 1939.
The building measured approximately 18 by 20 feet. The rear portion was built entirely of stone to the roof; the front half was stone up to a long row of windows that ran across the full width of the building and partway along both ends, with wood framing above. The design gave the lodge its distinctive character — solid and low against the wind in back, open and light-admitting in front, overlooking the Otter Creek Valley to the west, the Taconics on the horizon, and Pico and the peaks of the main range to the north. The original interior provided sleeping room for eight; additional bunks were later installed to raise capacity to twelve. Water could be found at springs 100 feet west on the Bucklin Trail and 325 feet north on the Long Trail.
The Long Trail News of October 1939 described its setting: "It overlooks the Otter Creek Valley and in the distance are the Taconics in the west with Pico and lesser peaks on the main range to the north… The accompanying cut gives a good view of the lodge and its sightly location above the stunted, wind-blown spruces of the peak."
The lodge was formally dedicated as the Charles P. Cooper Memorial Lodge on June 2, 1940.
Maintenance and Misuse
The Killington Section of the Green Mountain Club initially maintained the lodge and kept a caretaker on-site during the hiking season. By November 1959, the section reported it could no longer manage the work and transferred maintenance responsibility to the main Club.
The Long Trail Patrol undertook extensive repairs in 1960, addressing badly rotted roofing, rebuilding window frames, and repairing bunks. The Killington Basin chair lift, then new, allowed materials to be packed in without the burden of a full carry — a practical advantage that would matter many times over the coming decades. Vandalism required further repairs in 1961, including a new stove and replacement of thirty window panes at a materials cost of $20.77. The chair lift transportation was free.
The following summer, 1962, brought a watershed moment: all 96 panes of glass in the lodge were smashed out. The Club was forced to convert Cooper Lodge to an open shelter, and announced plans to screen the window openings against porcupines and install new stovepipe. The Vermont Department of Forests and Parks undertook extensive repairs in 1969.
The proximity to the Killington ski area, which opened in 1958 and grew rapidly through the 1960s and beyond, created new patterns of use. Skiers and winter visitors discovered the lodge as a windbreak and gathering place, and misuse became a chronic problem. Winter vandalism grew so frequent that around 2000 the Killington Section ceased maintaining Cooper Lodge entirely. Subsequent adopters eventually gave up as well, and the GMC stopped maintaining it altogether.
An Uncertain Future
By the time Cooper Lodge reached its seventy-fifth anniversary, its fate was genuinely uncertain. The GMC Trail Management Committee voted at some point to reduce the structure to just a foot or two of the stone walls — enough to mark the historic site — once a replacement shelter on Little Killington was ready. Then a Killington group proposed taking the lodge over, and the plan went into limbo.
In the fall of 2016, the GMC met with partners and historic preservation and restoration specialists to explore ways to repair and manage the shelter. The Summer 2017 Long Trail News noted that "Historic Cooper Lodge has been damaged by use as a winter hangout by skiers from nearby Killington Resort, and its future remains an enigma," while also reporting that the GMC had convened a Friends of Cooper Lodge group and was "committed to seeking common ground so everyone can enjoy the historic lodge." The key challenges identified were structural — particularly the badly damaged roof — and behavioral: repair alone would not be enough without a sustainable plan for managing use.
What Remains
The lodge remains a physically striking structure on its high ridge, and the site around it carries layers of history: the cellar hole of Meyerhoffer’s hotel is just above, the stone memories of two earlier shelters nearby, and Charles Cooper’s paint-spattered legacy in every blaze along the trail below. At 3,850 feet, with its long window-row facing west toward the Taconics and the Otter Creek Valley stretching below, it remains one of the most dramatically positioned shelters on the entire Long Trail.
Today, a GMC roving caretaker may be present during the hiking season to protect the high-elevation ecosystem around Killington Peak and manage overnight sites in the Coolidge Range. An overnight fee may be charged.
vSources
Long Trail News, October 1939 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail News, May/June 1940 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail News, November 1959 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail News, August 1960 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail News, November 1961 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail News, August 1962 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail News, February 1977 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail News, Summer 2017 (Green Mountain Club)
Long Trail Guide Book, 12th ed. (Green Mountain Club, 1940)
Long Trail Guide Book, 14th ed. (Green Mountain Club, 1951), pp. 24–25
Long Trail Guide Book, 22nd ed. (Green Mountain Club, 1983)
Long Trail Guide Book, 23rd ed. (Green Mountain Club, 1985), p. 43
Long Trail Guide Book, 24th ed. (Green Mountain Club, 1996)
Smoke and Blazes (Killington Section, GMC), nos. 20, 104, 31 (1978), 40 (1987), 54 (2001)
Woodward, Paul and Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History, 2nd ed. (Green Mountain Club, 1999), pp. 32–33
Curtis, Jane and Will, and Frank Lieberman. Green Mountain Adventure, Vermont’s Long Trail (Green Mountain Club, 1985)
GMC Killington Section. "Cooper Lodge." gmckillington.org
Lorentz, Karen D. "Killington Peak’s First Mountain Houses." Mountain Times, July 27, 2017
Lorentz, Karen D. "The First Rustic Cabins Yield More Lodging, Visitors for Killington." Mountain Times, August 23, 2017
Rutland Herald, June 3, 1940
