Little Rock Pond Shelter was a log Adirondack lean-to built in 1935 by the U.S. Forest Service on a small rocky island at the northwest corner of Little Rock Pond — a position reached by a log footbridge from the mainland and unlike almost any other shelter on the Long Trail. The open front of the shelter faced east over a natural rock terrace that sloped directly down to the pond; the quartzite cliffs of Green Mountain rose from the opposite shore; trout dimpled the water in the evenings. For twenty-seven years, this was one of the most celebrated overnight spots in the Green Mountains. It was replaced by a new USFS frame lean-to in 1962, and the island setting that had made it famous was subsequently abandoned. The 1973 Long Trail News published a letter from two End-to-Enders who had stayed at "Little Rocky" in the 1940s that still reads as a kind of elegy: the island gem, they wrote, had offered "a life lived equally in land, sky and water." No other shelter in this history of the Long Trail provoked quite that response.
The Rock Island Setting
Little Rock Pond at 1,810 feet is one of the clearest and most dramatic mountain lakes on the Long Trail. Its distinguishing features — steep quartzite cliffs on the west shore where Green Mountain’s face drops nearly into the water, and a chain of rocky outcroppings at the north end — made it a landmark from the trail’s earliest years. The 2nd edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1920) called it "a gem in the rugged setting." The shelter that arrived in 1935 was placed at the most dramatic of those outcroppings: a large rock formation rising from shallow water at the pond’s northwest corner, close enough to the western shore to reach by footbridge, isolated enough to feel like an island.
Hikers approaching from the south reached the shelter by a spur off the Long Trail that led down to the shore and out across the log footbridge. The 2014 Long Trail News, in a memoir written by a hiker whose father first reached the pond in the 1930s, provided the most complete surviving description of what they found there:
A rock cliff on the west shore, and further north an island with the shelter, reached by a log footbridge. The open front of the log shelter, built in 1935 by the U.S. Forest Service, faced east over a natural rock terrace leading down to the pond. It had shelves for supplies (used by hikers to share excess food), a picnic table and a stone-lined fireplace.
The east-facing open front meant the shelter received morning sun directly off the water. The rock terrace between the shelter’s open face and the pond’s edge served as both sitting area and approach to swimming. The shared supply shelf — stocked by passing hikers with surplus food for those who followed — was the kind of informal trail hospitality that characterized the Long Trail’s shelter culture in the mid-twentieth century.
Construction, 1935
The shelter was built by the U.S. Forest Service, which administered the Green Mountain National Forest land surrounding Little Rock Pond. The 10th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1935) is the first to list a formal shelter at the pond: "Little Rock Pond Shelter… On island, north west shore." The 14th edition (1951) confirms the date: "Little Rock Pond Shelter (1935)… On island, northwest shore." No GMC construction records have been found for this shelter, consistent with USFS authorship — it was built on federal land at federal initiative and maintained by the Forest Service rather than the Club.
The database record includes a note identifying the shelter as "Also called E Shore Shelter on Little Rock Pond." This appears to be an error. The east shore shelter was a separate structure built by the USFS in 1962 — the same year that the original island shelter was replaced. That east shore structure later became Lula Tye Shelter, moved south along the trail in 1972. The 1935 island shelter had no east-shore location; it stood on the island at the pond’s northwest corner throughout its existence.
First Hiker Accounts, 1935–1941
The earliest visitors left enthusiastic responses, and those responses found their way into print. Albert Tatro, writing in the August 1941 Long Trail News under the title "Rocky Pond," gave the shelter its most vivid early description:
A substantial shelter stands on a huge rock formation near the shore and Trail, reached by a rustic bridge. On this rock, rounded smooth as a skull, is a fireplace and iron grate. A very good arrangement for those who wish to rest and camp overnight; the shelter being large enough for a group of 8 or 10 persons. An elongated platform extending the entire length furnishes sleeping quarters, a good deal after the fashion of a field bed in a lumber camp.
Tatro’s image of the rock "rounded smooth as a skull" captures the geological character of the island better than any subsequent description: the quartzite surface, glacially polished, offered no soil for vegetation to take hold and therefore offered the shelter an unobstructed terrace down to the water. His comparison of the sleeping platform to "a field bed in a lumber camp" was apt — and historically resonant, since the area around Little Rock Pond had been logged extensively through the late 1920s. By 1941 the lumber era was ten years gone; the island shelter had replaced the logging camp’s informal hospitality with something more permanent and considerably more scenic.
The capacity Tatro reported — 8 to 10 — slightly exceeded the database’s 6 to 8. The shelter was a lean-to, and lean-to capacity was often estimated differently by different visitors depending on how tight a group could sleep.
A Shelter at Its Peak, 1943–1958
The years between Tatro’s 1941 visit and the USFS’s decision to replace the shelter in 1962 were the island lean-to’s period of greatest use and widest affection. The GMC’s photo archive documents visits across this span: a photograph from 1944 shows the shelter from the water; the 1957 photograph is the most recent taken before replacement.
The most eloquent testimony came from Mildred and Armand Siegel, two End-to-Enders who completed most of their Long Trail hike in the years 1943 to 1945 and who spent several days at what they called "Little Rocky." Their account was not published until the February 1973 Long Trail News — written as a response to news of the shelter’s removal from the island — but it described the wartime experience in terms that decades had not dimmed:
We are two End-to-Enders who did most of our trip in the years 1943-1945, and for us the few days we spent at ‘Little Rocky,’ as we have come to call it, were about as close as we have ever come in our lives to earthly paradise. This island gem, set in conditions of intimacy with waters lapping at its foot and the mountains across the pond ever-visible from the shelter, with its shelter that opened out to rocks that sloped down to the pond, made possible a life lived equally in land, sky and water.
The editor of the Long Trail News added a note of his own: "Little Rocky has been a favorite of many GMC’ers including yours truly, and no doubt many concur with Mr. & Mrs. Siegel in their fond recollections."
Later visitors continued to single out the location. A trip report in the February 1961 Long Trail News described a 1954 party that, "in spite of a most violent thunderstorm at Little Rock Pond, rated the shelter there as the most beautiful location at which they camped on the trip." The thunderstorm detail is notable: the shelter’s open front, with no protection from the east, would have been vulnerable to weather, yet the setting was so compelling that the experience remained positive in recollection.
The Gree Mountain Trail and Growing Use, 1958
In June 1958, Ben Ralston and members of Scout Troop 48 of Schenectady, New York, built a new trail to the summit of Green Mountain from the east. The August 1958 Long Trail News reported that the trail began "at the leanto bridge" — the footbridge to the island shelter — and ran up the mountain’s eastern face. The trail both increased foot traffic to the pond and gave hikers at the shelter an additional destination for day use. The same report reflected the Club’s view of the pond at that moment: "The area around Little Rock Pond is, we think, one of the most beautiful spots on the Long Trail."
The Green Mountain Trail added a new dimension to the pond as a destination. Hikers arriving from the south on the Long Trail could now base themselves at the island shelter and climb Green Mountain as a day hike, then return to the shelter for the evening — a configuration that made the shelter useful for parties who had no intention of continuing northward. This kind of recreational use accelerated the overuse problem that would eventually force the USFS to act.
Replacement, 1962
By the late 1950s, foot traffic to Little Rock Pond had grown to a level that the 1935 shelter and its island setting could not support without damage. The USFS responded by building a new frame lean-to on the island in 1962. The 17th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1963) described the new structure in terms that highlighted both the continuity of setting and the change in construction:
This frame shelter is beautifully located on a small island. Built by the USFS in 1962, it has bunk space for 8.
The new shelter (GMC database ID 147) occupied the same island as its predecessor, but replaced the log construction and Adirondack-style long sleeping platform with a standard USFS frame lean-to. The 1935 shelter was retired after twenty-seven years.
Simultaneously, the USFS built a second new shelter on the pond’s east shore — the East Shore Shelter — reached by the East Shore Trail. The two new structures together more than doubled the overnight capacity at the pond compared to what the original island lean-to had provided, distributing use between the island and the opposite shore.
The 1972 Moves and the Siegel Letter
A decade after the original island shelter was replaced, both of the 1962 USFS structures were relocated. In 1972, members of the Student Conservation Association moved the island shelter — retaining the name "Little Rock Pond Shelter" — from the island to a new location on the pond’s east shore, closer to the Long Trail, eliminating the need for a footbridge. The 22nd edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1983) confirmed: the shelter "was moved to its present location from a site on Little Rock Pond’s small island in 1972." The East Shore Shelter was moved further south and renamed Lula Tye Shelter, in memory of Miss Lula Tye, who had served as the GMC’s corresponding secretary from 1926 to 1955.
The 1972 island-to-shore relocation ended the island shelter tradition at Little Rock Pond entirely. What had begun in 1935 — a shelter positioned on a rock outcrop surrounded by water, approached by footbridge, with an open front facing the pond — no longer existed in any form. The 1962 frame lean-to had continued the island location but not the character of the 1935 structure; after 1972, neither survived.
It was in response to this news that the Siegels wrote their letter to the Long Trail News in February 1973. They acknowledged the practical reasons for the move — "Little Rock Pond Shelter had to be moved because it was ‘in the wrong place,’ with resulting ‘rapidly deteriorating conditions’" — but insisted that the island’s particular character was irreplaceable:
Well, what was paradise for two, three or five people might become hell for twenty or thirty or how many? But let it be recorded that for two people this was once the most ideally located of all camps and shelters on the Long Trail.
They closed with a quotation from Talleyrand — "Ceux qui n’ont pas vecu sous l’ancien regime n’ont pas connu la douceur de vivre" ("Those who have not lived under the old regime do not know how sweet life can be") — a formulation that placed the island shelter, by implication, in the company of lost worlds that could only be understood by those who knew them firsthand.
Relationship to Successor Shelters
Little Rock Pond Shelter 2nd (ID 147, 1962–present): The second island shelter was the direct replacement for ID 146, built on the same island, maintained by the same USFS authority, serving the same Long Trail location. The shift from log Adirondack to frame lean-to reflected the evolution of USFS shelter standards in the intervening quarter century. ID 147’s island tenure was shorter than ID 146’s — ten years, 1962 to 1972 — before the Student Conservation Association moved it to the east shore. Once relocated, ID 147 became the shelter that still stands at Little Rock Pond today, though at a fundamentally different location from either of its island predecessors.
Lula Tye Shelter (East Shore Shelter, 1962): The shelter that became Lula Tye was a companion structure to ID 147, built the same year on the opposite shore of the pond. It was never on the island and had no direct relationship to ID 146. Its 1972 relocation south and renaming in memory of Lula Tye was part of the same reorganization of pond shelter use that moved the island lean-to to the east shore, converting two competing pond shelters into two shelters along the same trail corridor south of the pond.
The Island Gem
The shelter database assigns Little Rock Pond Shelter 1st a 27-year span from 1935 to 1962. In that span it was documented in guidebooks from the 10th through the 15th editions, photographed nine times by hikers whose images survive in the GMC archive, described in vivid detail by Albert Tatro in 1941, visited by hundreds of Long Trail parties including the Siegels in the 1940s, and celebrated in the pages of the Long Trail News as recently as 2014. No other shelter in Division IV left a comparable record of personal attachment in the sources.
The reason is legible in every description: the island, the bridge, the east-facing open front, the rock terrace, the water on three sides, the mountains across the pond. These were not incidental features of a utilitarian structure. They were the shelter. When the 1935 structure gave way to a frame lean-to in 1962 and then to an east-shore lean-to in 1972, what was lost was not a building but a relationship between a building and its setting — the particular combination of water, rock, and open sky that the Siegels were trying to name when they wrote, from memory, about life lived "equally in land, sky and water."
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book, 7th Edition 1928. 1928.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 11th Edition, 1937. 1937.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1947 (1947). Green Mountain Club. 22.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1947 (1947). Green Mountain Club. 23.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1951 (1951). Green Mountain Club. 22.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1956 (1956). Green Mountain Club. 22.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1956 (1956). Green Mountain Club. 20.
- "Long Trail News." , no. February (1963).
- "Long Trail News." , no. February (1973).
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 10 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1935. Pp. 22.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. Pp. 23.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. Pp. 22.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 12 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940. Pp. 23.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 12 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940. Pp. 24.
