The construction of Jay Camp in 1936 was the work of the Long Trail Patrol, the GMC’s first paid trail crew. Founded by Roy Buchanan himself in the early 1930s, the Patrol grew out of his recognition that volunteer labor alone could not keep pace with the Long Trail’s maintenance needs as the trail’s popularity grew. When GMC President Mortimer R. Proctor donated a truck — marked ‘Long Trail Patrol No. 1’ and equipped with a mattress for overnight stays — Buchanan and his crew had the mobility to reach remote sections of the trail that Section volunteers could not easily maintain.
The Patrol built and rebuilt shelters throughout the 1930s, developing the distinctive ‘Buchanan shelter’ style: sturdy framed structures with open fronts, designed to weather Vermont’s harsh winters while offering hikers basic protection and comfort. Jay Camp 1st was somewhat different in design — it was a closed frame camp rather than an open-faced lean-to, with an inside fireplace, bunks for 8 to 12 persons, and a spring water source nearby. This more enclosed construction suited the northern climate, where driving winds and heavy snowfall made open shelters less hospitable than in the more protected terrain to the south.
The 11th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book, published in 1936 and revised in 1937, recorded the new camp’s existence, placing it on the trail at mile 249.8 on the old Montgomery Center-Jay Road. For hikers approaching Jay Peak from the south, the camp offered a stopping point in otherwise shelterless terrain — a place to spend the night before the final push to the summit, or to recover after a long day on the ridge.
Twenty-One Years on the Old Road: Life at Jay Camp 1st
Jay Camp 1st served hikers from 1936 to 1957 — twenty-one years during which it appeared in every edition of the Long Trail Guide Book and accumulated the registers, the memories, and the small incidents that constitute the human history of a backcountry shelter. The camp occupied a site on what had once been a through road — the old Montgomery Center-Jay Road, by then abandoned as a public thoroughfare but still recognizable as a clearing in the northern forest. The road’s abandonment gave the camp its characteristic setting: a wide, flat shelf of ground in the trees, with spring water nearby and a sense of having arrived at a place the modern world had half forgotten.
A photograph taken at the camp in the early 1940s shows Emma and Robert Domey standing before the camp’s exterior — a sturdy, dark-stained structure in the Vermont woods, two visitors pausing to mark their presence before moving on. It is the kind of photograph that shelters accumulate over decades: ordinary in its moment, invaluable in retrospect, a small window into the life of the trail in the years before the ski area and the highway transformed this corner of Vermont.
The camp’s register captured other moments. In 1942, a ten-year-old boy named Charles Purdin used the register to record his impressions of a family hiking trip on the Long Trail. His entry noted Jay Camp among the memorable experiences of the journey — the ordinary discovery of a shelter in the woods seen through a child’s eyes, carrying the particular freshness that distinguishes young observers from jaded ones. The Long Trail News of 1942 mentioned young Purdin’s register entry in its pages, a brief notice that preserved what would otherwise have been a private moment between a boy and a blank page.
"A ten-year-old hiker named Charles Purdin used the camp register to record his impressions of the family trip, noting Jay Camp among the memorable experiences of their Long Trail adventure."
— Long Trail News, 1942
By 1952, the Killington Section of the GMC undertook a multi-day expedition in the Jay Peak area that included a visit to Jay Camp. The inspecting party found the camp in poor repair. Porcupines — the Long Trail’s most persistent structural enemy, attracted to salt left in wooden surfaces by human hands and sweat — had damaged the floor and the bunks. The roof, however, remained sound. The damage was consistent with a camp that had seen heavy use over sixteen seasons without major repair: serviceable still, but showing its age. The 1952 inspection noted the conditions without alarm; porcupine damage was a routine finding in remote shelters, and the roof’s integrity meant the structure remained weathertight.
Vermont Route 242: The Road That Displaced the Camp
In the mid-1950s, two brothers changed the landscape around Jay Peak permanently. Ernest W. Gilpin and Wallace H. Gilpin — both Vermont state legislators and newspaper men from Troy — campaigned successfully for the construction of a highway across the south flank of Jay Peak, connecting the town of Troy to Montgomery Center. The Starr family of Troy donated portions of land for the right-of-way, and work proceeded through the latter half of the decade. The road that emerged, Vermont Route 242, opened a previously inaccessible corner of the northern Green Mountains to automobile traffic for the first time.
The highway’s construction was linked from the outset to the development of the Jay Peak ski area. Harold Haynes had incorporated Jay Peak as a ski resort in 1955; the resort purchased its first ski lift, a T-bar, that same year and opened for skiing in January 1957 under the direction of Walter Foeger, an Austrian ski instructor and former racer who had trained the Spanish Olympic ski team. The combination of the new highway and the new ski area transformed Jay Peak from a remote hiking destination into an accessible winter sports center — and in doing so, it directly threatened the site of Jay Camp 1st.
The camp sat near the old Montgomery Center-Jay Road — the same corridor that Route 242 was being built to replace and improve. In 1957, the GMC’s Trails and Shelters Committee announced that the camp would need to be relocated because the new highway construction would pass adjacent to the existing site, making the location untenable. After twenty-one years of service, Jay Camp 1st’s active life was over. The old road that had given the camp its setting and its character was being paved over and incorporated into a new era for the northern Green Mountains.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book. 11th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1936.
- Long Trail Guide Book. 11th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937.
- Long Trail News 1942 (1942). Green Mountain Club. 7.
- Long Trail News 1942 (1942). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail News 1952 (1952). Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. Pp. 61.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. Pp. 65.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 12 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940. Pp. 64.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 13 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1947. Pp. 61.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 14 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1951. Pp. 55.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 14 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1951. Pp. 58.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 15 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1956. Pp. 58.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 15 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1956. Pp. 57.
- Green Mountain Club. Guide Book of the Long Trail. 16 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1960. Pp. 66.
- Green Mountain Club. Guide Book of the Long Trail. 16 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1960. Pp. 66.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 17 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1963. Pp. 69.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 17 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1963. Pp. 68.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 18 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1966. Pp. 69.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 19 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1968. Pp. 70.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 19 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1968. Pp. 69.
