The 10th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book, published in 1935, described the camp as built in 1931 — but the contemporaneous record tells a different story. The Long Trail News of September 1933 discussed the naming of ‘the camp to be built at the junction of the Trail with the Canadian boundary,’ treating the shelter as something that had recently arrived or was newly completed. Later guidebooks, including the 24th edition of 1996, give the construction date as 1933 and credit the Long Trail Patrol — the GMC’s paid trail crew, founded by Roy Buchanan — with building the shelter. Whatever the precise year of completion, the camp was a product of the early 1930s, and the September 1933 naming discussion establishes that it was firmly in existence by that date.
The Long Trail Patrol had by that time developed a consistent and effective approach to shelter construction: sturdy framed cabins, built from local timber, designed to withstand Vermont’s brutal winters and the heavy use that comes with being a destination at the end of a long trail. Journey’s End was built as a closed framed cabin — similar in concept to Jay Camp 1st, built in the same era — with a stove, bunks sufficient for 10 or 12 persons according to the 1935 guidebook, and water available from a brook 300 feet to the north. Later guidebooks would list capacity as 8, reflecting either a recalculation of comfortable bunk space or a change in how the Club counted sleeping capacity.
The 1935 description also noted the camp’s connection to a splendid view: it looked out over Owl’s Head and other peaks to the northeast, a prospect that rewarded hikers who had come so far to reach the northern end of the trail. In the early decades, before the surrounding forest grew tall enough to screen the horizon, this view was a feature of the camp’s experience — the last vista on the Long Trail before the border, or the first glimpse of Vermont’s mountains for those walking south.
"Journey’s End" or "Journey’s Beginning"?: The Naming
The name the Club chose for the new shelter — Journey’s End — was not without its critics, or at least its good-natured questioners. A proposal published in the Long Trail News of September 1933 raised a point of endearing logic: the shelter sat at the junction of the Long Trail with the Canadian boundary, which meant it was equally a beginning as an ending, depending entirely on which direction the hiker was walking. The writer suggested a solution:
"We have a suggestion for obviating the inconsistency of naming the camp to be built at the junction of the Trail with the Canadian boundary ‘Journey’s End.’ That is, to call it ‘Journey’s End’ on the south end and ‘Journey’s Beginning’ on the north end. This would have the advantage of being true on both ends, and the camp would have the distinction of being the only one on the Trail, or probably anywhere else, with two perfectly good names."
— Long Trail News, September 1933
The suggestion was never formally adopted — the camp remained Journey’s End, and the name stuck through all subsequent guidebook editions and in the vocabulary of Long Trail hikers for the next eight decades. But the observation captured something real about the shelter’s singular position. Every other shelter on the Long Trail is a stopping point on a longer journey; Journey’s End is the only one that is also a destination, the last or first point on the entire trail system. Whether arriving from the south after a thru-hike, or departing southward at the start of one, the hiker at Journey’s End occupies an unusual position: at the exact limit of the trail’s ambition, where Vermont meets Canada and the Long Trail meets its own end.
Decades of Service: 1933 to 2004
Journey’s End Camp appeared in successive editions of the Long Trail Guide Book from the 1930s onward, its description evolving slightly with each revision. The 15th edition (1956) and 23rd edition (1985) both document the camp in its established form. The Long Trail News returned to Journey’s End repeatedly over the decades: references appear in 1946, 1954, 1959, 1983, 1986, and 1987, recording the ordinary rhythm of inspection, maintenance, and stewardship that sustained the shelter through more than seven decades of use. The Killington Section’s newsletter Smoke and Blazes noted the camp in its pages as well, reflecting the overlapping interest that multiple GMC sections took in a shelter at the symbolic terminus of the entire trail system.
The camp’s remote location, accessible only by hiking the Journey’s End Trail from North Troy, meant that maintenance required dedicated effort. The Northern Frontier Section of the GMC carried primary responsibility for this section of the trail, but the camp’s national significance as the Long Trail’s northern terminus drew attention from throughout the Club. The Long Trail News of 1983, 1986, and 1987 each carried items related to the camp, suggesting a period of heightened attention — likely connected to the GMC’s growing engagement with land protection in the northern Long Trail corridor during those years.
A milestone in that engagement came in 1987, when the Green Mountain Club launched the Long Trail Protection Campaign and completed its first land protection project: the acquisition of the Riendeau Tract, 117 acres in the town of Jay protecting the northernmost 1.2 miles of the Long Trail. For the first time, the land immediately surrounding Journey’s End Camp — and the trail that led to it — was in permanent conservation ownership, protected from development or closure. The Long Trail News of November 1987 announced the acquisition with a boldface headline: ‘FIRST LONG TRAIL PROPERTIES PROTECTED.’ Journey’s End Camp, which had stood on private land for more than fifty years, was now sheltered within the first piece of the Long Trail corridor to receive permanent legal protection.
The Ice Storm of 1998 and Later Years
The late 1990s brought a natural test to the old shelter. The ice storm of January 1998 — one of the most devastating weather events in Vermont’s recorded history, coating the northeastern United States and Canada in up to three inches of ice and toppling millions of trees — caused considerable damage to the roof of Journey’s End Camp. The damage was documented by Paul Woodward, one of the authors of the Long Trail System Shelter History, who noted its extent as part of his comprehensive survey of the trail’s shelters. The 1996 Long Trail News had carried an entry about the camp; the 1998 ice storm marked the beginning of a period of more intensive maintenance as the aging structure weathered the effects of the storm and the normal deterioration that comes with seven decades of backcountry use.
The view that had once been a feature of the camp’s appeal — Owl’s Head and the peaks to the northeast — had by this time been largely obscured by tree growth. As Paul Woodward observed, the forest that had been young around the camp in 1933 was mature forest by the end of the century, and the clearings and sightlines that the original builders had taken for granted were long gone. What remained was the shelter itself: solid enough, still in use, still appearing in guidebook editions, still receiving its annual share of end-to-enders and day hikers and weekend backpackers who had made the walk up the Journey’s End Trail to reach the northern terminus.
The Long Trail News of 2004 carried the last significant documentary record of the original camp, noting conditions and stewardship work in the area. By that time, a decision had already been reached to build a new, larger shelter at Journey’s End — a cedar camp that would replace the aging 1933 structure and serve the growing number of hikers who reached the terminus each year. The Fall 2004 edition of the Long Trail News carried the first report of the new Journey’s End 2nd: ‘a beautiful cedar camp built in the tradition of the Roy Buchanan and Long Trail Patrol Camps of the Thirties and Forties.’ The spirit of the original, if not the structure, was carried forward.
Retirement and Relocation: Moved to GMC Headquarters
When Journey’s End 2nd was built circa 2004, the original 1933 structure was retired from active service as a trail shelter — but it was not demolished. The fate that befell Jay Camp 1st (replaced by a highway), or the Honted House Camp (abandoned and decayed), did not await Journey’s End 1st. Instead, the Club made a decision that reflected the historical significance of the structure: the original camp would be preserved by relocating it to Green Mountain Club headquarters in Waterbury Center, Vermont, where it could continue to exist as a physical artifact of the trail’s early history.
The relocation required the camp to be disassembled on the Journey’s End Trail site — a process photographed before it began, producing the image captioned ‘Journey’s End, before being disassembled, 2012’ that now appears in the GMC Burlington Section’s Long Trail System Shelter History. The disassembly and transport took place around 2012, nearly a decade after Journey’s End 2nd opened, suggesting that the original camp may have remained on site for some years while plans for its relocation were finalized and carried out. The GMC’s headquarters at 4711 Waterbury-Stowe Road in Waterbury Center became the camp’s new home: a setting very different from the boreal forest at the Canadian border, but one that gave the structure a second life as a piece of institutional memory.
The decision to preserve Journey’s End 1st rather than discard it places it in an unusual category among Long Trail shelters. Most historic structures that are replaced simply disappear — demolished, burned, or left to decay. The 1933 cabin’s preservation speaks to its symbolic weight as the original shelter at the northern terminus of the oldest long-distance hiking trail in America. From those timbers, cut and assembled by the Long Trail Patrol in the early 1930s, hikers departing on southbound thru-hikes set out for Massachusetts; and to those same timbers, northbound end-to-enders arrived with the knowledge that they had walked every mile of Vermont. A structure that held that many journeys deserved, the Club evidently decided, to be held itself.
Sources
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 0134 (134). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 5.
- "Long Trail News." , no. September (1933).
- Long Trail News 1946 (1946). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 01 (1951). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 35.
- Long Trail News 1954 (1954). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 1959 (1959). Green Mountain Club. 2.
- Long Trail News 1983 (1983). Green Mountain Club. 10.
- Long Trail News 1986 (1986). Green Mountain Club. 12.
- Long Trail News 1987 (1987). Green Mountain Club. 22.
- Long Trail News 1996 (1996). Green Mountain Club. 13.
- Long Trail News 2004 (2004). Green Mountain Club. 31.
- Long Trail News 2004 (2004). Green Mountain Club. 31.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 15 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1956. Pp. 57.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 23 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1985. Pp. 86.
