Hazen’s Notch Camp is, in a sense, two stories in one building: the story of a shelter that stood in one place for nearly seventy years under two different names, and the story of the summer it was taken apart board by numbered board and carried, whole, to a new home a mile up the mountain. It is a classic “Buchanan camp” — one of the small, uniform log cabins that Roy O. Buchanan’s Long Trail Patrol built across northern Vermont in the mid-twentieth century — and its 1997 relocation remains one of the more remarkable preservation projects in the Long Trail’s history.
The Fred H. Tucker Camp
The first shelter in Hazen’s Notch was not called Hazen’s Notch Camp at all. It was built in 1928–29 and named for its benefactor, funded jointly by Fred H. Tucker of Boston, a longtime GMC trustee, and Mortimer R. Proctor, with residents of nearby Montgomery contributing fifty dollars toward the balance:
“Fred H. Tucker of Boston and friends, and Mortimer R. Proctor, contributed the balance of the cost… This has been named the Fred H. Tucker Camp.”
— Long Trail News, October 1929, p. 4
Guidebooks of the 1930s describe it as a closed, framed camp with a stove, water, and bunks for six to eight, set half a mile south of the highway at an elevation of about 2,000 feet — a modest but well-built structure for its time. The name held for the better part of a decade. It was not until April 1937 that the club formally renamed it, in recognition that the notch itself, and not simply its benefactor, deserved to give the shelter its name:
“The former Fred Tucker camp in Hazen’s Notch will remain where it is and will hereafter be known as the Hazen’s Notch Camp.”
— Long Trail News, April 1937, quoted in Woodward & Woodward, Long Trail System Shelter History, 2nd ed. (1999), p. 128
The notch itself carries an older name still — General Moses Hazen, who in 1778–79 built a military road through the gap from Peacham northward, part of the network of Revolutionary War-era roads that once threaded through these mountains.
Renaming did not halt the original building’s decline. By the mid-1940s, wartime maintenance disruptions had taken a visible toll, and a 1945 report on the state of the Trail found the camp already failing. The 1947 guidebook captured its condition bluntly:
“Now partly ruined. Emergency shelter for 3 or 4. Water. The club intends soon to build a new camp about 1 mile north of the old one.”
— Long Trail Guide Book, 13th ed. (1947), p. 33, quoted in Woodward & Woodward, p. 128
Roy Buchanan Builds a Camp
By 1948, the original Tucker-turned-Hazen’s-Notch camp was, in the words of a later club retrospective, simply “falling down.” The Long Trail Patrol, under Roy O. Buchanan — the University of Vermont-trained engineer who led the Patrol from 1931 to 1967 and personally had a hand in building thirty-seven of the shelters standing on the Trail at his retirement — built an entirely new cabin a half-mile north of the road, on Wade Brook.
“By 1948, the camp was falling down, so GMC’s Long Trail Patrol, led by the legendary Roy Buchanan, built a new shelter 1/2 mile north of the road.”
— Long Trail News, Fall 2007, p. 12
The new building followed a design Buchanan had refined across dozens of similar structures throughout northern Vermont, where shelter coverage had historically been sparsest: French Camp and Barrows Camp in 1931, Parker Camp in 1932, Journey’s End and Ritterbush in 1933, Shooting Star in 1934, and — his largest and, by most accounts, proudest work — Butler Lodge. A 1990 club retrospective, adapting language from Laura and Guy Waterman’s history Forest and Crag, describes the type precisely:
“The characteristic Buchanan camp was a small, enclosed cabin with bunks, shuttered windows, a single table with benches and a wood stove.”
— Long Trail News, August 1990, p. 18, adapting Waterman & Waterman, Forest and Crag (1989)
Buchanan borrowed the design directly from the logging camps of the era — easy to build, efficient with limited floor space, and outfitted with hinged wooden trap windows that could swing open and double as a table when propped up. It was, by the club’s own account, so standardized and so widely built that it became something more than a shelter type: a recognizable symbol of a particular era of Long Trail history. Buchanan himself was famous within the club for a dry summary of the design’s one real limitation, describing his camps as built for “six hikers or six porcupines, but not six hikers and six porcupines.” Those who worked under him remembered him as much for his temperament as his engineering: “mild, warm, friendly, and self-effacing… That man never had an enemy in the world,” one GMC president recalled.
The new Hazen’s Notch Camp, completed in 1948, held bunks for eight, with a tent platform nearby and water at Wade Brook fifty feet to the south — plain, functional, and unmistakably a Buchanan camp.
A Location Outgrown
The Wade Brook site served hikers well for nearly fifty years, but its very convenience — close to the road, easy to reach — became its undoing by the 1990s. Proximity to Route 58 made it a magnet for exactly the kind of casual use the shelter had never been built to withstand:
“By the 1990’s, partying and vandalism had made this location for the camp near the road undesirable.”
— Long Trail News, Fall 2007, p. 12
The problems went beyond noise and litter. The outhouse sited near the brook was poorly placed by any modern sanitary standard, with waste seeping toward the water it sat beside — a problem that had likely gone unaddressed for decades before it became disqualifying. Trash accumulation and vandalism compounded the issue. The camp had, in effect, become a party spot rather than a backcountry shelter, sitting too close to a public highway to function as either.
Taking It Apart to Save It
Faced with a genuinely deteriorating situation, the Green Mountain Club made an unusual choice: rather than simply retire the old camp and build a new one, or abandon the site and let the structure go, the club decided to move the entire building — intact, historic, original lumber and all — to a more remote and defensible location a mile up the mountain, on the ridge saddle between Sugarloaf Mountain and Bruce Peak.
“The GMC decided to move the shelter rather than build a new one to preserve a shelter built by the LT Patrol of the 1930’s & 40’s; the camp at Hazen’s Notch was by far the best candidate.”
— Tim Tierney, Long Trail News, Winter 1997, p. 6
The project was carried out largely by a Vermont Youth Conservation Corps wilderness crew — teenagers aged sixteen to nineteen who spend a month living and working in the woods — together with GMC field staff, volunteers from Saint Michael’s College’s Outdoor Volunteer Efforts program, the Lamoille County Summer Activity Program, and named individual volunteers including Don Hill, Becca Myette, Al Fiebig, and Pete Ketcham.
The technical challenge was real. Fifty-year-old nails driven into hand-oiled wood, along with decades of small holes, cuts, and wear across the walls, made the prospect of disassembling and reusing the original lumber look close to impossible at first glance. It took a specialist to see otherwise:
“Although the fifty-year-old nails in hand-oiled wood and many apertures on the walls made reusing the materials seem impossible, Jeff Bostwick, a GMC volunteer who reconstructs post-and-beam barns for a living, said the project would be easy.”
— Tim Tierney, Long Trail News, Winter 1997, p. 6
Bostwick showed the crew how to take the building apart without damaging the wood, and from there the project became an exercise in careful inventory: a GMC field team assessed every piece of lumber and confirmed that most of the building was in genuinely good condition and worth saving. Each piece was measured, evaluated, and numbered, then sorted into piles by floor, roof, and wall framing before the long carry up the mountain began.
Work Through a Flood
The project’s timeline was complicated by something no amount of planning could have accounted for: a flood struck northern Vermont while the relocation was underway, severely washing out Route 58 itself and turning the nearby town of Montgomery into a federal disaster area.
“All this work was accomplished despite a flood that hit northern Vermont halfway through the project. Route 58 was severely washed out and the nearby town of Montgomery was a federal disaster area. After some creative road work, the GMC brought in building and food supplies via four-wheel drive trucks. The Youth Corps went on with its work despite the flood.”
— Tim Tierney, Long Trail News, Winter 1997, p. 6
No more specific date for the flood survives in the Long Trail News account beyond “this summer” and “halfway through the project,” but its severity is clear from the federal disaster designation for Montgomery — a striking backdrop for a volunteer crew of teenagers to keep working through.
By the time the project wrapped, it had consumed more than 2,300 volunteer and staff work hours. Most of the reassembled building used its original materials; only the sills and flooring were replaced with new lumber, and a metal roof went on in place of the old tar roof — a practical upgrade rather than a departure from the original design. A new outhouse was built at the new site as well, using red worms to process waste beneath the seat, which the club’s own account describes as the first “moldering” privy on the Long Trail. A surviving photo caption captures the crew’s mood at the finish line: “The Vermont Youth Conservation Corps’ wilderness crew celebrates with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream after successfully moving Hazen’s Notch Camp to a new site… Great job, VYCC!”
“This project, to anyone’s knowledge, was the first time an antiquated cabin had been moved to a different location on the Long Trail. By going the extra mile to preserve Hazen’s Notch Camp, we have saved an integral part of the LT system.”
— Tim Tierney, Long Trail News, Winter 1997, p. 6
It is worth noting that this claim of being the first on-trail relocation stands up reasonably well, though a related but distinct kind of move followed a few years later: in 2004, volunteers disassembled Journey’s End Camp, another Buchanan camp, in Jay and relocated it — not to a new site on the Trail, but off-trail entirely, to GMC’s land in Waterbury Center, to serve as a museum piece. Hazen’s Notch Camp’s move remains the one that kept a historic Buchanan camp doing its original job, on the Trail itself, in active use.
Buchanan Camps Today
Hazen’s Notch Camp is one of a shrinking number of surviving Buchanan camps. A 1998 club assessment counted eight still standing in northern Vermont: Journey’s End, Jay, Tillotson, and Parker camps, along with Birch Glen Camp, Butler Lodge, Glen Ellen Lodge, and Shooting Star Shelter. A 2007 article on Tillotson Camp’s restoration noted that it was, by then, “the last of this kind still in its original location” — a distinction Hazen’s Notch Camp itself held for the fifty years it stood on Wade Brook, before its own move in 1997.
The surrounding notch has also seen its share of conservation attention independent of the shelter itself. The Hazen’s Notch Association, a nonprofit founded by former GMC president Rolf Anderson and his wife Sharon, maintains a fifteen-mile network of trails headquartered nearby on Route 58, and a series of land acquisitions — a 1934 state purchase protecting Sugarloaf’s summit, a 1988 GMC Long Trail Protection Program purchase, a 1992–94 gift of land from the late Mark Dimock of Oregon (whose ashes are buried on the property, marked by a memorial boulder on Route 58), and a 2000 purchase of the “Echt Tract” from Bernhard Echt of Florida — have steadily expanded the protected land around the notch since the shelter’s 1997 move.
Maintenance and adoption of the camp and its approach trails has continued in the decades since. Records show new stoves carried in during the club’s Adopt-a-Shelter program era, sill and foundation repairs and full roof replacements by the Long Trail Patrol in the 1980s, and — as recently as the 2020s — Northern Frontier Section volunteers such as Howard Van Benthuysen clearing blowdowns and maintaining the camp, following decades of stewardship by adopters including Walter Pomroy, who maintained the stretch of trail between Routes 242 and 58 for twenty-five to thirty years.
## Sources
– Long Trail News, August 1929, p. 2.
– Long Trail News, October 1929, p. 4.
– Long Trail News, 1937 (April), p. 1.
– Long Trail News, 1954, p. 4.
– Long Trail News, November 1971, p. 5.
– Long Trail News, 1974, p. 7.
– Long Trail News, August 1980, p. 7.
– Long Trail News, 1984, p. 6.
– Long Trail News, February 1985, p. 2; 1985, p. 4.
– Long Trail News, August 1990, p. 18 (adapting Waterman & Waterman, Forest and Crag, 1989).
– Long Trail News, 1996, p. 14.
– Long Trail News, Summer 1997, p. 6.
– Long Trail News, Winter 1997, p. 6 (Tim Tierney, “Hazen’s Notch Camp Moved”).
– Long Trail News, Summer 1998, pp. 12–13.
– Long Trail News, 1999, p. 11.
– Long Trail News, Spring 2005, p. 12.
– Long Trail News, Spring 2006, p. 14.
– Long Trail News, Fall 2007, p. 12.
– Long Trail News, Winter 2007, p. 6 (Kelly Walsh, on Tillotson Camp).
– Long Trail Guide Book, 10th ed. (1935), p. 57.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 11th ed. (1937), pp. 61, 65, 69.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 12th ed. (1940), pp. 64, 68.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 13th ed. (1947), pp. 61, 65, 70.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 14th ed. (1951), pp. 55, 58, 63.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 15th ed. (1956), pp. 57, 58, 63.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 16th ed. (1960), pp. 65, 66.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 17th–20th eds. (1963–1971), various pages.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 21st–23rd eds. (1977–1985), various pages.
– Long Trail Guide Book, 24th ed. (1996).
– Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History, 2nd ed. (1999), pp. 52, 53, 128, 154, 160.
– Waterman, Laura & Guy. Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail-Blazing and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains. AMC Books, 1989.
– Northern Frontier Newsletter (Northern Frontier Section, GMC), p. 3.
– Smoke and Blazes (Killington Section), issue 73, p. 1.
