Hell Hollow Camp stood at the end of a road in a steep-sided valley known as Hell Hollow, in the town of Woodford, Bennington County, Vermont. The site lay roughly half a mile south of what is today Route 9 — the Molly Stark Highway — tucked into the wooded hollow cut by a small stream that drains the western slopes of the Glastenbury Wilderness. The landscape is characteristic of the southern Green Mountains: dense second-growth forest, rocky brook beds, and the remnants of the old Bennington & Glastenbury logging railroad that once ran along Bolles Brook and up into the hills above.
The valley’s name, as evocative as any in the southern Long Trail corridor, suited the terrain: deep, shadowed, and hemmed in by the ridgeline above. For early hikers arriving from Glastenbury Mountain or from the Bennington side on foot, Hell Hollow represented the gateway between the populated valley and the wild ridge above. A 1915 photograph of the camp’s "warming" — the celebratory gathering that formally dedicated a new shelter in the GMC tradition — shows a large party assembled outdoors in the hollow on August 16, 1915, the camp’s earliest known documented appearance.
The Camp and Its Origins
Hell Hollow Camp was built and maintained by the Bennington Section of the Green Mountain Club. The camp was a log cabin shelter of the closed, equipped type: the structure was locked against casual entry, and hikers wishing to use it obtained the key at Griswold’s store in Bennington before setting out. This arrangement was standard for early GMC camps in areas where the road accessibility of a site made open shelters vulnerable to misuse.
The camp warming photograph of August 16, 1915, establishes that the structure existed and was formally opened in that year, predating the first formal Long Trail Guide Book edition (1917), in which it was listed as "fully equipped with bunks for 10 persons." The camp thus stands among the earliest shelters in the Long Trail system, constructed during or just before the period of the trail’s initial organization under the Green Mountain Club’s founding generation. The surrounding hollow — with a stream running below the camp, two fine swimming pools, and a south-facing piazza that looked out toward the sunset sky behind Bald Mountain — offered the kind of setting that early club members valued: accessible from Bennington by road, yet clearly within the mountains.
Hell Hollow and the Glastenbury Side Trail
From Hell Hollow Camp, an early Long Trail route variant — eventually designated a side trail — gave hikers an alternative approach to Glastenbury Mountain by following the stream for roughly a mile and a half before picking up the grade of the old Bennington & Glastenbury logging railroad, which provided a level walking surface for another mile and a half to the abandoned settlement of Old Glastenbury. The railroad, built in 1873 and abandoned after a flood in 1898, had long since been reclaimed by the forest, but its bed remained walkable and offered an interesting historical passage through the wilderness. This optional route appeared in the Long Trail Guide Book from the first edition (1917) through at least the fifth edition (1924), when it was still listed as an alternative from Hell Hollow through the old Glastenbury railroad grades. By the sixth edition (1924), the route had been downgraded to a side trail rather than a main alternative.
Robert Frost at Hell Hollow, 1922
The camp appears by name in one of the most celebrated episodes in Long Trail history: the 1922 end-to-end attempt by Lesley Frost and her family party, which included her father, the poet Robert Frost.
On August 15, 1922, the group — Lesley, her brother Carol, her sister Marjorie, their friend Lillian LaBatt, and Robert Frost himself — departed from the Frost family home in South Shaftsbury and spent their first day bushwhacking over East Mountain and Bald Mountain before reaching the Long Trail at Hell Hollow Camp. This was, as Lesley later explained in her trip report, the equivalent of starting at the Massachusetts state line, also a day’s walk from South Shaftsbury by road. Their first night in the system was spent at Hell Hollow Camp, making it the inaugural shelter of what became one of the most celebrated trail journeys in Vermont history.
For Robert Frost — 48 years old, worn from a demanding year at the University of Michigan, and wearing a new pair of shoes that would soon cripple him — the walk from South Shaftsbury to Hell Hollow on that late summer day was both an adventure and a harbinger of the troubles ahead. He would leave the trail a few days later, near Bromley Mountain, defeated by his shoes and eventually by his knees. His children, "The Big Four," pressed on without him and completed the trail in 17 days.
Amenities and Character of the Camp
A 1929 account in Long Trail News described the camp’s attractions with evident affection. Hikers could enjoy "a refreshing dip in two fine pools in the stream below" and dine "on the piazza, looking at the sunset-sky back of the Bald Mountain." These details sketch a shelter that, while accessible by road and therefore not a true backcountry camp, offered genuine mountain atmosphere: the sound of the stream, the pools for swimming, and a prospect to the west that rewarded the end of a day’s walk.
Walter Collins O’Kane, whose 1926 Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains remains a primary source for the early Long Trail, described the camp and its setting in detail, noting the access arrangements (key at Griswold’s) and the character of the hollow itself.
Recognition and the Question of Replacement
By 1928, the camp’s situation near Route 9 had begun to work against it. The same road access that made Hell Hollow Camp convenient for hikers also made it attractive to non-hikers: vandals, parties, and casual visitors who contributed trash and damage without contributing to the trail community’s care of the shelter. Seepage from the surrounding terrain affected the brook-side site. The Green Mountain Club’s Long Trail News of 1928 noted that the GMC leadership had identified Hell Hollow Camp for replacement as part of the club’s ongoing trail development program. The combination of highway proximity, environmental problems at the site, and the camp’s susceptibility to misuse — issues that would recur elsewhere in the trail system in subsequent decades — led to its designation for replacement.
Hell Hollow Camp does not appear in the 8th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1930), confirming that it had ceased to function as a GMC camp by that date.
Sources
- Articles: 13.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 30.
- Long Trail News 1928 (1928). Green Mountain Club. 2.
- Long Trail News 1929 (1929). Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Long Trail News 1961 (1961). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 43 (1990). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Long Trail News 2020 (2020). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Green Mouintain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 1 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1917. Pp. 10.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 2 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1920. Pp. 28.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 4 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1922. Pp. 38.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 4 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1922. Pp. 37.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 5 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 40.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 5 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 39.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 6 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 48.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 7 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1928. Pp. 51.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 429.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 379.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 382.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 380.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 53.
