High on the Monroe Skyline, where the Long Trail crosses the wind-scoured ridgeline between Mount Ellen and General Stark Mountain, a short side path once led down the eastern slope to one of the most carefully tended shelters on the entire Long Trail. Glen Ellen Shelter was built in 1919 under the direction of Professor Will Seymour Monroe, the driven and meticulous trail builder whose name now graces the entire section of the Long Trail from Appalachian Gap to Lincoln Gap. For more than a decade the shelter served hikers traversing this central Vermont ridgeline, and though it fell into official disuse well before mid-century, its sturdy construction kept it standing — offering at least marginal shelter — into the early 1960s.
The mountain at the center of Monroe’s skyline section bears a name with literary roots. Mount Ellen — at 4,083 feet, tied with Camel’s Hump for the third-highest peak in Vermont — is believed by many to have been named for Ellen Douglas, the heroine of Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 poem The Lady of the Lake, a name reportedly bestowed by the young trail workers who helped build the route in the 1920s. An alternate tradition holds the name derives from a fictional character in a book by Middlebury publisher and conservationist Joseph Battell. Either way, the mountain, the shelter at its flank, and ultimately a celebrated ski area all came to share the name "Glen Ellen."
Construction and Character
Monroe and a group of workers began work on the Glen Ellen shelter around 1918, with the structure completed and in use by 1919. It was placed 0.2 mile down the Barton Trail, a spur that descends the eastern slope of the ridgeline from its junction with the Long Trail between Mount Ellen and General Stark Mountain.
Walter Collins O’Kane, who hiked and documented the Long Trail’s shelters for his 1926 book Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains, described the shelter in appreciative terms. "This shelter was built in 1919 and is provided with comfortable bunks, a stove, and a table," O’Kane wrote. "Back of it, a path leads in a few yards to a spring which is reliable except in extreme drought. In front of the shelter is a little rock walled garden of native plants." That rock-walled native plant garden was a signature flourish — a small ornamental touch in the wilderness that reflected Monroe’s botanical sensibilities and his characteristic care for his shelters’ surroundings. Like the trail work itself, the shelter bore the mark of a man who regarded the mountains as a place deserving of thoughtful stewardship, not just practical utility.
The Barton Trail from the Long Trail junction descended the east slope into the Mad River Valley below — the same general watershed drained by Mill Brook toward the Mad River, in what is today the Warren and Fayston area of Washington County.
Supersession and Long Decline
By 1933, the Green Mountain Club’s Long Trail Patrol — organized in 1931 under Roy O. Buchanan — had constructed a new, larger shelter 0.3 mile down the Barton Trail from the Long Trail junction: the Glen Ellen Lodge, a log structure providing bunks for eight. This new lodge was situated below the 1919 shelter’s position on the trail. With a more capacious, purpose-built replacement in place, the original 1919 shelter fell into unofficial disuse at some point in the 1930s.
Yet Monroe’s construction proved more durable than the GMC’s eventual bookkeeping suggested. The seventeenth edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1963) noted of the original shelter: "Built in 1919, though officially abandoned and not maintained, it has stood up very well and still offers some shelter. It was located 0.2 mile up the Barton Trail from the present-day lodge." In other words, more than three decades after the 1933 lodge superseded it — and decades after the GMC stopped maintaining it — the shelter Monroe built still offered something to a hiker in need. The exact year it finally collapsed or was demolished is not recorded in available sources.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book. 17th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1963.
- Bushnell, Mark. “Whence Camel’s Hump and other Vermont mountain names?.” VT DIgger, September 15, 2019.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 411.
- Walter O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. 1926.
