Jay Camp 2nd came into being not by design but by displacement. When the construction of Vermont Route 242 — the new highway connecting Troy and Montgomery Center across the south flank of Jay Peak — forced the relocation of Jay Camp 1st from its site on the old Montgomery Center-Jay Road, the Green Mountain Club faced a straightforward problem: the most northerly section of the Long Trail, in some of Vermont’s most remote terrain, would be left without a shelter at a critical access point. The solution was equally direct.
In 1958, the Long Trail Patrol — the GMC’s paid trail crew, founded in the early 1930s by Roy Buchanan to maintain the sections of the trail that volunteer labor alone could not adequately serve — constructed a new framed cabin a quarter-mile from the original camp’s site. The new Jay Camp occupied ground that the highway project had not reached, on land adjacent to what would eventually become the Jay Loop Trail. It was built to sleep 8 to 12 persons, equipped with standard bunk construction, and sited to take advantage of a spring located 50 feet east of the cabin — a reliable water source in the spruce and fir forest of the northern Green Mountains.
The Long Trail News of February 1959 recorded the camp’s construction and its cost: $515.33. That figure, precise to the penny, reflects the meticulous accounting the GMC applied to its trail-building program — every board, every nail, every day of paid labor tracked and reported to the membership. The camp was built to last, as it has: more than sixty-five years later, Jay Camp 2nd remains in active use, the only shelter on the Jay Loop Trail and one of the most remote overnight facilities on the entire Long Trail system.
Location and Access: The Jay Loop Trail
The new camp sits 0.3 miles west of Route 242, reached by a spur trail that branches from the Jay Loop Trail — a side trail that connects the Long Trail north of the old Jay-Montgomery Center Road and provides access to Jay Peak from the south without requiring hikers to walk along the highway. The Jay Loop Trail itself traces the terrain west of Route 242, linking the Long Trail to a network of approaches to Jay Peak and its neighboring summits.
Jay Peak rises 3,862 feet above sea level, barely five miles south of the Canadian border. Big Jay, the 3,786-foot summit flanked to the southwest, stands on the border of Franklin and Orleans counties; Little Jay (3,182 feet) occupies the ridge between them. The terrain surrounding Jay Camp is high boreal forest — dense stands of balsam fir and red spruce, with yellow birch and sugar maple on the lower slopes — subject to some of the most severe weather in Vermont. Jay Peak receives more snowfall than any other ski area in the American Northeast, and the forest around the camp reflects that reality: trees bent and shaped by prevailing winds, the understory thin and mossy, the springs reliable because the land holds moisture through the long winter.
The 16th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1960) recorded the new camp for the first time, and the 17th edition (1963) continued to describe it, placing it within the system of shelters and access points that the guidebook assembled for hikers approaching Jay Peak from the south. The camp’s position on the Jay Loop Trail rather than on the Long Trail itself gave it a slightly different character from shelters that sat directly on the main footway: it was a destination, reached by a deliberate turn off the main route, rather than a way-stop encountered in the natural flow of travel.
The Long Trail Protection Campaign and the Big Jay Parcel, 1993
For most of its first three decades, Jay Camp 2nd sat on land the Green Mountain Club did not own. The trail and the shelter were maintained by the Club through an arrangement with the private landowner, as was typical for much of the Long Trail corridor in the years before land protection became a systematic priority. The Club could build and maintain the camp, but had no legal guarantee that the land would remain accessible to hikers, or that a future sale or development would not close the trail through the area entirely.
This vulnerability was not unique to Jay Camp. As the Long Trail aged and Vermont’s northern landscape came under increasing development pressure in the 1970s and 1980s, the GMC recognized that the trail’s survival depended on securing a permanent legal corridor. In 1986, the Club launched the Long Trail Protection Campaign — an ambitious effort to acquire or obtain conservation easements on the private lands through which the trail passed, working with willing landowners and in partnership with the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Park Service.
The campaign moved quickly through the late 1980s and early 1990s, protecting miles of trail and dozens of shelters. In 1993, it reached the Jay Camp parcel. The GMC and the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation closed a deal on 1,573 acres of land in Richford, Montgomery, and Westfield — a tract known as the Big Jay parcel, named for the 3,786-foot mountain that rises from its western portion. The parcel contained 1.3 miles of the Long Trail, 0.4 miles of the Jay Loop Trail, and Jay Camp itself. The land was added to Jay State Forest, giving the camp permanent legal protection under state ownership and ending the uncertainty that had attended the shelter’s tenure on private land.
"1,573 acres added to Jay State Forest in Richford, Montgomery, and Westfield VT, protecting 1.3 miles of Long Trail, 0.4 miles of Jay Loop Trail, Jay Camp."
— Green Mountain Club, Land Conservation Year-by-Year, 1993
The Long Trail News of 1993 carried word of the deal; the 1994 issue followed up with additional reporting on the parcel’s significance and the broader progress of the Protection Campaign in the Jay area. The acquisition was a milestone not only for Jay Camp but for the entire northern end of the Long Trail: it anchored a block of protected land in one of the trail’s most remote and ecologically significant sections, and it ensured that hikers approaching Jay Peak from the south would always find the camp waiting at the end of the Jay Loop Trail spur.
The Northern Frontier: Stewardship of a Remote Shelter
Responsibility for maintaining Jay Camp has rested with the Northern Frontier Section of the Green Mountain Club — the section whose territory covers the northernmost miles of the Long Trail, from Hazen’s Notch to the Canadian border. The Northern Frontier Section’s maintenance work on the camp appears across decades of Long Trail News references: the 1999 issue documented conditions at the shelter, the 2008 issues carried two separate mentions of work in the area, the 2017 issues reported again, and the 2021 issues noted activity at the camp in two separate entries. The Northern Frontier Newsletter of 2022 carried the most recent published record of the camp’s condition and care.
The Northern Frontier section of the Long Trail presents particular maintenance challenges. The terrain is high and remote; access to shelters requires a significant hike; the climate is more severe than anywhere else on the trail south of the Canadian border. Jay Camp sits far enough from any road that routine work — replacing boards, maintaining the water source, clearing blowdowns on the approach trail, emptying and relocating privies, repairing the roof after a hard winter — requires crews to carry tools and materials in on their backs. The Long Trail Patrol’s spring visits and the Northern Frontier Section’s volunteer work parties are the mechanisms by which this maintenance has been sustained across more than six decades of the camp’s existence.
The 24th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1996), published three years after the Big Jay parcel deal, recorded the camp’s current state for the first time in the post-protection era: a framed cabin with bunk space for 10, a tent platform just before the camp on the approach trail, and water available 50 feet east. The description was essentially unchanged from the camp’s earliest guidebook listings — a sign that the structure built in 1958 for $515.33 had held up well against the decades and the weather.
Jay Camp in the Twenty-First Century
The Long Trail Protection Campaign continued to expand the protected land base around Jay Camp in the years after 1993. In 2001, an additional 3,764 acres were added to Jay State Forest in Richford, Montgomery, and Westfield — further buffering the camp and its surrounding forest from development pressure and consolidating the GMC’s and state’s management of the northern Long Trail corridor. In 2005, 184 more acres in Jay protected 1.6 additional miles of the Long Trail, and in 2010 another 166 acres added the Laura Woodward Shelter and 2 more miles of trail to the protected network.
By the 2010s and 2020s, Jay Camp occupied a dramatically more secure landscape than it had in its first decades. The 1,573-acre Big Jay parcel had been the beginning; the surrounding Jay State Forest had grown to encompass thousands of acres of northern Vermont forest, all managed in coordination between the GMC’s volunteer sections and the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. The camp itself — still the same framed cabin built by the Long Trail Patrol in 1958 — had become one of the oldest continuously operating shelters in the northern section of the Long Trail.
Sources
- "Long Trail News." , no. February (1959).
- Long Trail News 1993 (1993). Green Mountain Club. 8.
- Long Trail News 1994 (1994). Green Mountain Club. 1.
- Long Trail News 1994 (1994). Green Mountain Club. 1.
- Long Trail Guide Book. 24th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1996.
- Long Trail News 1999 (1999). Green Mountain Club. 11.
- Long Trail News 2008 (2008). Green Mountain Club. 9.
- Long Trail News 2008 (2008). Green Mountain Club. 12.
- Long Trail News 2017 (2017). Green Mountain Club. 18.
- Long Trail News 2017 (2017). Green Mountain Club. 18.
- Long Trail News 2021 (2021). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 2021 (2021). Green Mountain Club. 19.
- Northern Frontier Newsletter (Northern Frontier) 2022 (2022). Northern Frontier Section, Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Green Mountain Club. Guide Book of the Long Trail. 16 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1960. Pp. 65.
- 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. 68.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 17 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1963. Pp. 68.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 55.
