The third Laura Woodward Shelter is a post-and-beam lean-to built in September 2001 by Tom Abbott, a farmer and thru-hiker from Sanbornton, New Hampshire, who donated it to the Green Mountain Club. It stands on the same ridge north of Jay Peak where its predecessors stood — and it carries a meaning beyond the shelter itself, because Tom Abbott died in 2004, one week after completing his third and final Long Trail shelter, and what he began at Laura Woodward changed the way the GMC builds in the backcountry.
Tom Abbott
Tom Abbott owned Abbott Farm in Sanbornton with his brothers, and during winters he cut white pines from the farm. He had thru-hiked both the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail when end-to-end completions of those routes were still rare achievements. By 2001 he was an experienced hiker who had spent years on long trails and in backcountry shelters, and he had decided he wanted to give something back.
One spring day in 2001 he walked into GMC headquarters and said he wanted to donate a shelter to the club.
The timing was right. The second Laura Woodward Shelter — built in 1956 to replace the original, which had burned in 1955 — was failing. Forty-five years of winters had rotted its sill logs past the point of repair. The GMC needed a replacement, and Abbott had white pine, tools, and the skill to frame a post-and-beam lean-to from scratch. The club accepted his offer.
Abbott then did something that surprised the GMC volunteers who worked with him: before the shelter could be flown to its ridge site, the foundation had to be poured. He drove to Vermont and spent two weekends laying the foundation alongside GMC volunteers, accompanied throughout by his Airedale terriers, Ellie and Maple. The Long Trail News (Winter 2004), in its obituary for Abbott, recorded what the GMC remembered from those weekends: "Tom kept commenting on how impressed he was with our volunteers. We wish we’d had more time to tell him how impressed we were with him."
Building in the Shadow of September 11
The shelter Abbott pre-built in his yard was designed to be disassembled, bundled, and airlifted to the site. The GMC had adopted helicopter delivery for remote projects to avoid cutting access roads through the vegetation — expensive but clean, leaving no ATV trail and minimal ground disturbance.
The delivery was scheduled for the week of September 11, 2001. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all civilian aircraft across the country that day, and the helicopter could not fly. When the ban lifted within a week, bad weather moved in and created further delays.
Finally, on September 21, the helicopter flew. The pilot, Carl, flying for Joe Brigham, Inc., had GPS coordinates for both the Laura Woodward and Shooting Star sites — Shooting Star Shelter, four miles to the north, had collapsed under record snowfall the previous winter and was also being replaced simultaneously. At the Laura Woodward site, dense tree growth and the location "nestled between two ridges" made the drop zone hard to spot from the air. Walter Pomroy solved the problem by standing in the clearing and waving an orange emergency blanket until the pilot circled around and found him.
The helicopter made six 800-pound drops at each site. The moment the materials landed, the crews began assembly. As crew leader Bill Clark reported, they "heard the distinctive whump-whump of the rotor blades" long before they saw the aircraft. By the end of Saturday, September 22, both shelters were standing. More than thirty-five volunteers had put in over a thousand hours on the two projects combined; the helicopter alone had cost over $4,700.
Abbott’s pre-framed post-and-beam structure went up fast. Once the helicopter delivered the bundles, the shelter was completed in five hours.
The Shelter
The third Laura Woodward Shelter is an Adirondack-style, three-sided post-and-beam lean-to. Its most distinctive material detail is the floor: Abbott milled the boards himself from white pines felled on his New Hampshire farm, and they run twenty-four inches wide — a specification that hikers still notice and comment on. The shelter carries the same location, name, and designation as its predecessors: Long Trail Mile 14.9, Division 12, elevation 2,800 feet, approximately 3 miles north of Jay Camp.
The shelter’s land was formally protected in 2002. The GMC’s Long Trail Protection Program, in its 2002 field season, protected 4.4 miles of trail and 1,079 acres in the northern divisions, including the land around Laura Woodward Shelter — specifically securing it from potential expansion by the Jay Peak Resort, which operates immediately to the south on the same ridgeline. The action was reported in the Trail Talk (Montpelier Section, Fall 2003) as part of a broader summary of protection work in Division 12.
Tom Abbott’s Legacy
Abbott built two more shelters after Laura Woodward. In 2002 he completed Lost Pond Shelter; in 2004 he completed Rolston Rest Shelter in Division 5. He died at home in Sanbornton on August 14, 2004 — one week after Rolston Rest was finished.
The Long Trail News (Winter 2004) ran his obituary in a section headed "GMC Loses Steadfast Friends." It described his three shelters simply: "The other signature post-and-beam shelters he pre-built and donated to the club are Laura Woodward (2001) and Lost Pond (2002)."
Abbott was not the first person to build a post-and-beam shelter on the Long Trail — that distinction belongs to Laurel and Erik Tobiason, who completed the Stratton Pond Shelter in 1999. But what Abbott did with Laura Woodward, Lost Pond, and Rolston Rest — building from his own farm timber, pre-framing off-site, and donating the completed structure — demonstrated the method’s possibilities at a moment when the GMC was rethinking how to build durable, low-impact shelters in remote terrain. Of the fourteen Long Trail shelters built since Stratton Pond, eleven have used post-and-beam construction.
The Shelter Today
The third Laura Woodward Shelter remains standing and in active use. It is maintained by the Northern Frontier Section of the GMC, which is responsible for the trail from Jay Camp to the Canadian border. In the severe 2021 drought, when water sources dried up across Division 12, the spring near Laura Woodward was one of the few reliable water points on the northern trail — noted with gratitude in the Northern Frontier Section’s Winter 2022 newsletter as hikers from both directions traded information about where to find water.
The shelter stands where Charles Doll and Phillips Carleton camped in the summer of 1930 while cutting the final miles of the Long Trail. Three structures have now occupied that ridge site across nearly a century of Long Trail history. The third was built by a farmer who drove down from New Hampshire with his dogs, poured a foundation on a Vermont hillside, and came back a few months later to watch a helicopter drop the frame he had cut from his own trees.
Sources
- Northern Frontier Newsletter (Northern Frontier). Northern Frontier Section, Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Long Trail News 2001 (2001). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail News 2001 (2001). Green Mountain Club. 14.
- Long Trail News 2004 (2004). Green Mountain Club. 12.
- Trail Talk (Montpelier) 2004 (2004). Montpelier Section, Green Mountain Club. 10.
- Northern Frontier Newsletter (Northern Frontier) 2022 (2022). Northern Frontier Section, Green Mountain Club. 5.
- “In Vermont, All Trails Lead to Rolston Rest".” Trust for Public Land,. Last modified 2023. Accessed July 24, 2026. https://www.tpl.org/blog/in-vermont-all-trails-lead-to-rolston-rest.
