Gifford Woods State Park Shelters

Near the summit of Killington Peak, at an elevation of about 2,180 feet in a saddle between the high ridge and the highway gap below, the Long Trail and the Appalachian Trail share a signpost and then go their separate ways. This junction — marked on maps as Maine Junction — is the point at which the AT peels off the Long Trail’s ridgeline route and turns east, beginning the long descent toward the Connecticut River and the remaining miles through New Hampshire and Maine to Katahdin. The Long Trail continues north, as it has since 1910, toward Jay Peak and the Canadian border.

Below Maine Junction, the Appalachian Trail threads down the eastern flank of the Killington massif and passes through a small piece of state land tucked between Route 4 and Route 100 in the former township of Sherburne, now incorporated into Killington. The state land — surrounded on two sides by ski resort terrain and on the others by the highway — is Gifford Woods State Park. It is not a dramatic destination in the way of mountaintop parks, and it has no prominent summit. What it has is a stand of trees that have been growing, undisturbed, since before the Revolution — and, since 1939, a campground that has served as the principal overnight facility on this section of the Appalachian Trail corridor through central Vermont.

The Gift of the Woods

The person named Gifford, for whom the park is named, has been lost to the accessible historical record. No reference in the park’s documentation, the state’s forestry records, or the histories of the surrounding area identifies a Gifford family connection to this particular parcel, though the convention in Vermont place names of this period strongly suggests either a landowner whose family had worked the terrain for generations or a donor who transferred land to the state in the park’s early years. What can be said is that the land was acquired in 1931, when the state of Vermont purchased a thirteen-acre parcel from Lee Pearsons — a modest initial foothold that would eventually anchor a much larger holding.

The timing was deliberate. The early 1930s were years of intense public interest in outdoor recreation and state park development across New England, and Vermont’s Department of Forests and Parks had been actively seeking suitable parcels for a growing network of public campgrounds. The Pearsons land in Sherburne offered something unusual: a remnant of the original northern hardwood forest that had once covered these mountain slopes, undisturbed by the logging operations that had cleared most of Vermont’s accessible forest in the nineteenth century. While the rest of the hillsides had been logged and partly farmed and in some places logged again, this small parcel had escaped. The trees — sugar maple, beech, yellow birch, and white ash, some of them enormous by the standards of the second-growth forests that surrounded them — were evidence of what the Vermont woods had looked like before European settlement reshaped them.

Additional land came through donation. Walter K. Barrows, who had observed motorists stopping along Route 100 to look at the old trees from the roadside, donated acreage that expanded the protected stand. By the time the state assembled the full Gifford Woods holding in subsequent decades, it encompassed some 285 acres — with the old-growth stand at its ecological heart.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1939

The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived at Gifford Woods in 1933, two years after the initial land purchase, and transformed the raw parcel into a functioning state park. The Corps was at the height of its Vermont operations in 1933 and 1934, with enrollees from CCC camps across the state working on road construction, reforestation, and park development under the joint direction of the U.S. Army and the Vermont Department of Forests and Parks. At Gifford Woods, the work proceeded in two phases.

In 1933 and 1934, CCC crews built the park’s basic infrastructure. They constructed the park office and ranger’s quarters, a picnic area, a stone restroom building, trails, and the park entrance with its characteristic stone gate — a construction style the Corps used across the Northeast that gave CCC-built parks a distinctively handsome, solid-looking approach. The entrance at Gifford Woods, with its cut-stone pillars and the road curving in under old-growth canopy, established the tone of the place from the moment visitors arrived. The work also included a parking area and the first interpretive improvements to the old-growth stand.

The second CCC phase came in 1939, when crews returned to Gifford Woods and constructed the camping area. This was the development that gave the park its function as an overnight facility — and, for Long Trail and Appalachian Trail hikers, its role as a way station on one of the most traveled hiking corridors in the northeastern United States. The 1940 edition of the Long Trail Guide Book carried the first mention of Gifford Woods as a campground facility, noting it as an available waypoint on this section of the combined Long Trail / Appalachian Trail.

Five Log Shelters, 1939–1949

The camping area the CCC built in 1939 included log shelters of the style the Corps favored for state campgrounds across Vermont and New Hampshire in the late New Deal years: frame construction on log sills, sleeping platforms with wooden bunks, open-faced or lightly enclosed depending on the site, each shelter equipped with a fireplace or stove. These were not the three-sided Adirondack-style lean-tos of the GMC trail system, but they occupied a similar functional role — overnight shelter for people who carried their gear on their backs or arrived by the highway.

Within a decade the facility had matured into something that impressed visitors. The 1949 Long Trail News described Gifford Woods as offering five log shelters, each fitted with benches and fireplaces, along with a covered terrace, an "excellent toilet building," and running water — a level of comfort unusual in backcountry Vermont. This was, in the language of the day, a developed campground rather than a backcountry shelter site: managed, maintained, and equipped with amenities that hikers on the wilder sections of the Long Trail could only dream about. The state’s Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation handled reservations and fees, distinguishing the Gifford Woods overnight experience from the honor-system, first-come shelters of the GMC system.

The same 1949 notice reflects the Appalachian Trail’s relationship to the campground: the AT was by then routing through Gifford Woods as a standard element of its Vermont passage, making the park’s shelters available to long-distance through-hikers as a matter of course. The 1951 Long Trail News confirmed the route in explicit terms, noting the AT’s passage through the campground on its way to Vermont Route 100.

Where the Appalachian Trail Goes

The Appalachian Trail’s relationship with Gifford Woods State Park reflects the complex geography of its Vermont passage. North of the park, the trail shares the Long Trail’s ridgeline corridor through the main spine of the Green Mountains — the celebrated miles over Killington Peak, Pico Peak, and the series of high ridges connecting them. This shared passage runs for more than a hundred miles southward through Vermont, from Maine Junction in the north all the way to the Massachusetts border at the southern terminus of the Long Trail.

At Maine Junction, the AT leaves the shared ridge and begins its descent to the east. Dropping from the high terrain of Killington’s upper slopes, the trail passes through second-growth forest and emerges into the mixed landscape around Kent Pond — a glacially formed body of water just east of Route 100 — before crossing into the campground at Gifford Woods. The trail then continues around the pond and across Route 100, heading northeast toward the Connecticut River valley and the trail’s onward route through New Hampshire and Maine.

The campground thus sits on the AT corridor in a transitional zone: below the high ridge of the Long Trail / AT shared passage but above the highway and valley floor, in the belt of terrain where hikers descend from serious mountain travel into the relative civilization of Route 100. For a through-hiker moving south to north, Gifford Woods represents the last developed campground before the long stretch over Killington and onto the ridgeline. For a hiker moving north to south, it is the first settled overnight stop after the descent from the high terrain.

The 1956 edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (15th edition, page 28) carried the campground in its listings. The 1983 edition (page 47) noted it again, by which time the campground had been substantially enlarged from its 1939 footprint. The 1996 24th edition continued to carry it as part of the AT infrastructure in central Vermont.

The Old-Growth Forest

The ecological feature that distinguishes Gifford Woods from every other state park in Vermont, and from most parks in the northeastern United States, is the old-growth northern hardwood forest in the seven-acre Natural Area east of Route 100. The trees here — sugar maple, beech, and yellow birch dominant, with some white ash and hemlock — were never cut. They grew through the colonial era, through the Revolution, through the great clearing of Vermont’s farmland in the nineteenth century, and through the equally great abandonment and reforestation of the twentieth. They are not large by the standards of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, but in a region where centuries of timber harvest removed almost all of the original forest, their survival is remarkable.

The state recognized the area’s significance relatively early. In 1965, the Department of Forests and Parks designated the stand a Natural Area — one of the first such designations in Vermont’s state park system — specifically to protect the old-growth character of the trees and forest floor. The designation imposed management restrictions that kept the area free from development and logging.

In 1980, the federal government added its own recognition when the old-growth stand was designated a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service — an acknowledgment that the Gifford Woods forest represented a natural feature of national significance, not merely a state-level curiosity. The designation brought interpretive attention to the stand and contributed to the educational programming that the state subsequently developed around it.

In 2002, a forty-acre portion of the park encompassing the CCC-era facilities was listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its association with the Civilian Conservation Corps. The park thus carries two distinct layers of historic recognition: the natural heritage of the old-growth forest and the cultural heritage of the 1930s New Deal work program that built the campground around it.

The Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation later developed two short interpretive trails through and around the old-growth area: the Kent Brook Trail, a one-mile loop through the hardwood forest, and the Gifford Woods Interpretive Trail, a shorter 0.3-mile loop with exhibit panels explaining the natural and cultural history of the stand. Together these trails have made the old-growth forest the primary interpretive draw for day visitors who arrive not as hikers on the Long Trail or Appalachian Trail but as people who want to see what a Vermont forest looked like before the axe arrived.

Expansion and the Modern Campground

The original 1939 campground was enlarged significantly in 1959, following the acquisition of the Kent Farm property that lay adjacent to the original Gifford Woods parcel. The Kent Farm land added the terrain around Kent Pond to the park’s holdings and provided room for additional campsites and overnight facilities. Most of the leanto structures currently in the park date from the 1960s expansion that followed this acquisition — wooden-frame shelters of a type the state developed as a standard for its campground overnight facilities in this period.

The modern Gifford Woods State Park offers twenty-two tent and RV campsites, twenty-one lean-to shelters, and four rental cabins — a considerably more varied and larger overnight infrastructure than the five log shelters the CCC built in 1939. The lean-tos are reservable through the Vermont state parks reservation system, distinguishing them in both availability and character from the first-come-first-served GMC shelters on the Long Trail itself. The park’s campground straddles Route 100: the developed camping facilities lie on the west side of the highway, and the Natural Area and Kent Pond lie to the east.

Trail Work and Recent Years

The Appalachian Trail’s passage through the Gifford Woods area underwent significant improvement work in the early 2000s. A 2005 Long Trail News reported on the completion of trail work that solidified the AT’s route through this section — hardening the tread in areas prone to erosion and wet conditions, and clarifying the trail’s line through the campground and around Kent Pond. This kind of infrastructure investment reflected the broader commitment by the Green Mountain Club, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, and the U.S. Forest Service to address the increased use that the AT had absorbed since the trail’s completion was celebrated in the 1990s.

The campground facilities themselves have received periodic maintenance over the decades, though the wooden-frame lean-tos that date to the 1960s expansion have required ongoing attention to remain habitable. Unlike the GMC shelters in wilderness areas, the Gifford Woods lean-tos benefit from their proximity to a maintained road network and a park management infrastructure that can bring materials and equipment to the site without the hand-carry requirements that govern work in designated wilderness.

The Park Today

Gifford Woods State Park is located at Route 100 near its junction with Route 4 in Killington. The park is open from late May through mid-October. The campground offers twenty-two campsites, twenty-one lean-to shelters, and four rental cabins, with all facilities reservable through the Vermont state parks system. The Appalachian Trail passes through the campground and around Kent Pond on its way between Maine Junction, on the Killington ridge above, and Route 100 to the east. The Kent Brook Trail (one mile) and the Gifford Woods Interpretive Trail (0.3 miles) provide access to the old-growth Natural Area east of the highway.

The old-growth northern hardwood forest — seven acres, designated a Natural Area in 1965 and a National Natural Landmark in 1980 — remains the park’s most significant feature: a seven-acre remnant of the forest that covered these hillsides before European settlement, preserved by accident of ownership through three centuries of timber harvest and farming and reforestation around it, and now protected by the combined weight of state and federal designation.

The CCC stone gate at the park entrance, built in 1933 by enrollees from one of the Corps’s Vermont camps, still stands. The trees behind it have been growing since before Brigadier General Moses Hazen’s men pushed north through these mountains in 1779.

Sources
Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. Gifford Woods State Park (park page). https://fpr.vermont.gov/gifford-woods-state-park [113 acres; location; Natural Area description (7 acres); CCC development; AT; Kent Brook Trail; Interpretive Trail; 1965 designation]
Living New Deal. Gifford Woods State Park – Killington VT. https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/gifford-woods-state-park-killington-vt/ [CCC development timeline: 1933–34 office/ranger quarters/picnic area/restrooms/entrance/trails; 1939 camping area; source: vtstateparks.com]
Long Trail News (1949). Green Mountain Club. [Five log shelters with benches and fireplaces; covered terrace; excellent toilet building; running water]
Long Trail News (1951). Green Mountain Club. [AT through campground to VT Route 100]
Long Trail News (2005). Green Mountain Club. [AT trail section work in Gifford Woods area]
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book, 1940 ed. [First mention of Gifford Woods campground]
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book, 15th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1956, p. 28.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book (1983 ed.), p. 47.
Green Mountain Club. Guide Book of the Long Trail, 24th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1996.
Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History, 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999.
Wikipedia. "Gifford Woods State Park." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifford_Woods_State_Park [Park history; CCC; old-growth; National Natural Landmark 1980; NRHP 2002; AT route; campground expansion 1959; Kent Farm; Walter K. Barrows donation; 285 acres]
National Park Service. National Natural Landmark designation, 1980. [Old-growth northern hardwood forest]

Sources