When the Long Trail Patrol arrived at Glastenbury Mountain in 1965 to build a new shelter, they were working on a summit with a long institutional history. The steel camp built by the Bennington Section in 1929 had stood near the summit for more than thirty years before its removal in the early 1960s. The fire warden’s cabin, which had served hikers through the early 1960s, was also gone. For the first time since 1927, the summit had no overnight facility — a gap that the patrol was there to close.
The structure the patrol built was a log lean-to: an Adirondack-style, three-sided open shelter of the design that had by then become standard on the Long Trail. The shift from the steel camp’s fully enclosed all-weather construction to an open-faced lean-to reflected the GMC’s philosophy of the period and the conditions of the site. The lean-to offered bunks for six people and was situated in a clearing that provided limited views to the south — enough to remind overnight hikers of the mountain’s position in the southern Green Mountains without the full panoramic exposure of the summit above. A spring forty feet to the east on the Long Trail provided reliable water. The 18th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1966) carried the first listing of the new shelter on page 22, establishing it as a standard waypoint on this section of the trail.
The lean-to replaced the steel camp’s closed construction with something fundamentally different in character: where the 1929 camp had been an all-weather metal box designed to shelter hikers through the hardest conditions a Vermont summit could deliver, the 1965 shelter was open to the air on its south face, vulnerable to rain and wind, and dependent on a fire for warmth. It was, in this sense, a more demanding shelter than its predecessor — but also a lighter, simpler structure, easier to build and maintain in a location accessible only on foot.
The Shelter in Its Corridor
The Glastenbury Mountain Shelter occupied a strategic position in the Long Trail’s shelter network through the southern mountains of Bennington County. To the north, Caughnawaga Shelter — a small log structure built in 1931 by the boys of Camp Najerog, with bunks for five and a reliable brook thirty feet in front — had been standing since the same year the Long Trail Patrol was founded. The Caughnawaga shelter received major repairs in 1977, when the logs in its rear wall were replaced, the roof was renailed, and all the nail holes were tarred against the weather.
The section of trail between these shelters and the trailhead at Vermont Route 9 — the Molly Stark Trail, the main highway connecting Brattleboro and Bennington — was the primary access corridor for hikers approaching Glastenbury from the south. Route 9 sits at approximately 1,360 feet; the Long Trail climbs north from it through the hills and ridges of the Bennington uplands before ascending to the Glastenbury summit at 3,748 feet. The elevation gain is substantial, and the terrain between the highway and the mountain is remote enough that a hiker caught out in bad weather on the upper sections would have needed Glastenbury Mountain Shelter as a genuine refuge.
The guide books of the late 1960s and early 1970s — the 19th edition (1968, page 21) and the 20th edition (1971, page 23) — listed the shelter among the waypoints on this section, tracking its continued presence through a period of significant change in Long Trail use patterns.
A Trail Remade: The 1975 Relocation
The early Long Trail in southern Vermont had been built partly on mountain ridgelines and partly on existing roads, farm lanes, and public highways — a practical compromise that got the trail through difficult terrain and private land quickly, at the cost of sending hikers along stretches of pavement where the backcountry experience the trail was intended to provide gave way to road walking. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the Green Mountain Club and the U.S. Forest Service worked systematically to relocate these road-walking sections onto proper trail tread.
The Glastenbury section saw significant relocation work in 1975. A new Long Trail route connecting Harmon Hill and Maple Hill with the Glastenbury Mountain Shelter was completed during that season, rerouting the trail across terrain that offered hikers a genuine wilderness experience in place of the road margins the older alignment had required. The Long Trail News of 1975 and 1976 recorded the completion of this work. For hikers approaching Glastenbury Mountain from the south along the new alignment, the approach became a sustained climb through forest and over open ridges rather than a mix of pavement and path — a change that improved the quality of the experience and brought the trail into closer conformity with the character the GMC had always intended for it.
The relocation also affected the shelter’s position in the system. A shelter whose access trail now led continuously through mountain terrain was a more attractive and more logical destination than one reached partly along roads. The 21st edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1977, page 27) captured the shelter’s updated position in the system that emerged from these years of relocation work.
Pressure on a Small Shelter: The 1970s
The decade that produced the trail relocation also brought unprecedented numbers of hikers to the Long Trail. The late 1960s counterculture had sparked enormous interest in outdoor recreation, and the 1970s saw the effects cascade through every shelter system in the northeastern mountains. Glastenbury Mountain was a particularly attractive destination — remote, with a summit fire tower (rebuilt by the Youth Conservation Corps in 1975), and located near the southern end of a long roadless stretch of the trail. Hikers who made it to the summit were rewarded with the kind of isolation that the more accessible sections of the trail rarely offered.
The shelter’s six bunks were never designed for the volume of use the 1970s brought to this site. A Long Trail lean-to of the 1965 era was sized for the trail’s historical use levels — a modest number of hikers per season, with overnight parties typically small enough that six bunks would suffice. By the mid-1970s those assumptions had been overtaken by reality. Parties that arrived at the shelter after a full day’s hiking from Route 9 found it full. Hikers without shelter camped nearby, with the impact on the surrounding terrain that uncontrolled camping always produces.
The Long Trail News citations from 1970, 1971, and 1974 reflect the GMC’s ongoing attention to this section through these years — maintenance work, trail improvements, and the steady management effort required to keep a heavily used shelter functional. The shelter was not failing; it was simply operating under conditions far beyond what its original design had anticipated.
The 1979 Survey and the Case for Replacement
In 1979 the Green Mountain Club and the U.S. Forest Service conducted a joint survey of shelters along the Long Trail. The survey was a systematic assessment of the physical condition and functional adequacy of the trail’s overnight infrastructure — an effort to identify which shelters needed repair, which needed replacement, and which needed to be taken out of service. The Glastenbury Mountain Shelter received an unequivocal verdict: the log lean-to was rapidly deteriorating, its capacity of six was inadequate for the site’s use levels, and it should be replaced within three years.
The recommendation did not arrive without supporting evidence. During the 1980 and 1981 field seasons, caretakers stationed at the site recorded their nightly occupancy systematically. The numbers they documented were striking: an average of six campers per night — already at the shelter’s theoretical maximum — with nights of ten or more campers not uncommon. A shelter whose design capacity was being regularly exceeded by two-thirds during a typical season was not merely inadequate; it was generating the kind of overuse impact that degraded both the site and the experience for every hiker who arrived to find it full.
The caretaker program that produced these records was itself a response to the problem. A caretaker at Glastenbury Mountain Shelter in the early 1980s managed not only the shelter but the broader camping area: the spring, the privy, the tent sites that proliferated around a popular summit where hikers who couldn’t fit in the shelter needed somewhere to sleep. The data the caretakers gathered, season by season, built the empirical case for what the 1979 survey had already recommended: a substantially larger replacement shelter.
Planning for Goddard Shelter
The replacement took shape through a collaboration that drew on multiple organizations and a private memorial gift. Ted Goddard had served the Green Mountain Club in several capacities — as president and treasurer of the club and as past president of the Bennington Section. His connection to the southern Long Trail was personal and long-standing. After his death, his son Ted Goddard Jr. provided funds in his memory specifically for the construction of a new shelter on Glastenbury Mountain, and the project proceeded under the joint sponsorship of the Bennington Section and the U.S. Forest Service.
The construction effort that produced the replacement shelter brought in community partners in ways that had become uncommon on a trail whose infrastructure had traditionally been built by club members and professional patrol crews. Boy Scout Troop 353 of Bennington peeled the logs for the new structure. BSA Troop 355 built the rock footings. The materials, too heavy and bulky to carry efficiently on foot over the long approach from the road, were airlifted to the summit by the Vermont Air National Guard — a logistical partnership that put the new shelter’s construction in a different category from anything the club had attempted on Glastenbury before.
The resulting structure was 20 by 16 feet, log construction with an open front: a Goddard Shelter, in honor of the man whose family had made it possible, completed by the Bennington Section and the Forest Service in May 1985. Its bunk space for twelve was exactly double what the 1965 shelter had provided.
Dismantled, 1985
The Glastenbury Mountain Shelter — the log lean-to that had served hikers for twenty years — was dismantled in 1985 as part of the transition to its replacement. A photograph preserved in the GMC Burlington archives shows the dismantling in progress: the shelter’s logs being taken apart on the summit, the cleared site waiting for the new structure that would serve the next generation of Long Trail hikers.
The site Glastenbury Mountain had now hosted overnight facilities continuously since 1927, when the VTOA watchman’s cabin was first occupied. The specific chain of structures — the forestry cabin, the steel camp, the log lean-to, and now Goddard Shelter — had each been products of their own era’s understanding of what a backcountry shelter should be. The 1965 shelter’s twenty-year life was the shortest of any facility at this location, a reflection both of its modest construction and of the intensity of the use it was asked to absorb.
The Long Trail News of 1985 reported the completion of Goddard Shelter and the end of its predecessor. For hikers who arrived on the Glastenbury summit after the summer of 1985, the new structure — twice the capacity of the old, built with Air National Guard assistance and Boy Scout labor, bearing the name of a man who had given his working life to the Green Mountain Club — was the only overnight shelter they would know.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book. 21st Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1965.
- Long Trail News 1966 (1966). Green Mountain Club. 8.
- Long Trail News 1970 (1970). Green Mountain Club. 9.
- Long Trail News 1971 (1971). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Long Trail News 1971 (1971). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Long Trail News 1974 (1974). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Long Trail News 1975 (1975). Green Mountain Club. 7.
- Long Trail News 1976 (1976). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 1977 (1977). Green Mountain Club. 12.
- Long Trail News 1982 (1982). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 1984 (1984). Green Mountain Club. 7.
- Long Trail News 1985 (1985). Green Mountain Club. 12.
- Long Trail News 2001 (2001). Green Mountain Club. 12.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 18 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1966. Pp. 22.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 19 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1968. Pp. 21.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 20 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1971. Pp. 23.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 21 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1977. Pp. 27.
