Randall Camp was an abandoned logging camp on the north slope of Camel’s Hump, approximately 3.7 miles south of the Bolton railroad station, that served as the first shelter on the first portion of the Long Trail ever put into service. In July 1911 — just over a year after the Green Mountain Club was founded — GMC President James P. Taylor led a small party up from the Winooski River to Camel’s Hump summit, working out the Bolton-to-Camel’s Hump route that would become the Long Trail’s inaugural section. Two miles below the summit, they passed an abandoned lumber camp. It offered shelter, and the GMC made use of it. By the time the first Long Trail Guide Book was published in 1917, the buildings were in poor condition — a stove in the ox stable was the best that could be had. Randall Camp is listed in the GMC database from 1911 to 1917; it does not survive. It was never a GMC structure, but its existence at precisely the right place at precisely the right time gave the Long Trail its first overnight facility, and the men who slept there were among the first Long Trail hikers in history.
A Note on Sources
Randall Camp left almost no documentary record. It was a logging camp, not a built shelter; it belonged to no section, had no adopter, and generated no committee minutes. The primary sources are two: a brief description in the first Long Trail Guide Book (1917), and a passage in the Long Trail System Shelter History (Woodward, 2nd ed., 1999, p. 84) that quotes a narrative by Lewis J. Paris, M.D., describing the original Bolton-to-Camel’s Hump reconnaissance. Three photographs in the GMC collection show the Randall & Roberts sawmill operation in the Waterbury area in 1899, 1914, and 1930; these document the company whose camp stood on the trail. Additional context is drawn from GMC founding histories and records of the Long Trail’s first decade.
Setting: The North Slope of Camel’s Hump
Camel’s Hump (4,083 feet) is the third-highest peak in Vermont and one of the most distinctive — its twin-humped silhouette visible from Burlington and the Champlain Valley on clear days. The mountain’s north slope, drained by a series of brooks flowing down toward the Winooski River valley, was logging country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Timber operations in the Waterbury and Bolton areas took advantage of the abundant softwood on the lower slopes and the waterways that could float or transport lumber out of the hills.
The Randall & Roberts operation was one of those enterprises. George Randall and Luke Roberts ran sawmills in the Waterbury area; three photographs in the GMC collection document their mill at the site of what is now the Little River Dam. A photograph dated 1899 shows the Randall and Roberts sawmill at Waterbury; a second, from 1914, shows the same operation under the designation "Randall-Roberts Sawmill"; a third, from 1930, shows the mill at its location near the present Little River Dam. (The GMC database notes that one of these photographs may be the same image as site #71 in That Beautiful Vale Above The Falls, Patrick Yaeger’s history of the Little River settlement — the overlap reflects the interwoven character of the lumber industry in the Waterbury drainage.)
By the time Taylor and his companions made their 1911 reconnaissance, the camp on the north slope of Camel’s Hump — 3.7 miles south of Bolton Station — was already abandoned. The logging operation had moved on, or wound down, leaving structures behind: buildings sufficient to offer shelter from the weather, and a stove in the ox stable.
The Green Mountain Club and the Long Trail’s Beginning (1910–1911)
The Green Mountain Club was founded on March 11, 1910, at the Van Ness Hotel in Burlington, Vermont. Its stated purpose was "to make the Vermont mountains play a larger part in the life of the people" — a mission that almost immediately took shape as a plan to build a footpath the length of the Green Mountains from Massachusetts to Canada.
That path — the Long Trail — did not begin at the southern end. The first work on what would become the trail was done in the fall of 1910, when Craig Burt and Clarence Cowles scouted the route between Mount Mansfield and Nebraska Notch. But the first portion to be formally put into service was the Bolton-to-Camel’s-Hump section, and the reconnaissance that established it took place in July 1911.
The account that survives is from Lewis J. Paris, M.D., quoted in Woodward (Long Trail System Shelter History, p. 84). Paris was among those who accompanied GMC President James P. Taylor — the Club’s founder and animating spirit — on the reconnaissance. With them was Prof. R.E. Upson and Mr. E.H. Allen. Paris’s account, written in the idiom of the period, opens with a description of Vermont as "a trackless wilderness, surrounded by an indifferent people" — a characterization that reads partly as irony, partly as the kind of boosterism-in-reverse that justified the enterprise. If Vermont was wilderness, it needed paths; if its people were indifferent, they needed to be shown what they had.
The Reconnaissance of July 1911
The journey began at Bolton Station, on the Central Vermont Railway line in the Winooski River valley. The party crossed the Winooski by ferry — there was no bridge at that crossing — and began their ascent of the north slope of Camel’s Hump, following a large brook up through the logged-over terrain toward the summit. The total distance from Bolton to the summit was six miles, according to Paris’s account.
Two miles below the summit, they came upon the abandoned lumber camp. Paris notes it plainly: the camp offers shelter. The structures were standing; the stove in the ox stable worked. For a party that had walked six miles uphill from a river crossing, this was a meaningful way-point — the first of what would eventually become a two-hundred-and-seventy-mile chain of shelters running the length of Vermont.
The party continued to the summit and back, establishing the route. That autumn and the following years, the GMC worked to cut trail, blaze the route, and make it passable. The Bolton-to-Camel’s-Hump section became the first portion of the Long Trail to be formally put into service — the opening link in a path that would not reach the Canadian border until 1930.
Randall Camp in the Guide Book (1917)
The first Long Trail Guide Book, published in 1917, gave Randall Camp its only formal written description. The entry is terse, as all the guide entries are: "Buildings in poor condition. Stove in ox stable which affords fair protection from rain and cold."
That description tells the story of six years of use on the trail’s first section. From 1911 to 1917, Randall Camp was the overnight option on the north slope of Camel’s Hump: not a GMC lean-to, not a built camp, but an inherited structure that the club found, noted, and included on its maps. By 1917, the buildings had deteriorated to the point where only the ox stable with its stove provided reliable shelter. The camp was not being maintained — it was being used until it could not be used anymore.
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The Randall & Roberts Operation
George Randall and Luke Roberts operated a sawmill that operted from 1899 and 1914 under the designation "Randall and Roberts Sawmill" at the present day Little River Dam.
The Little River settlement, which occupied the drainage north of the present Waterbury Dam, was home to some fifty families at its peak and several sawmill operations. By the 1920s the settlement had largely dispersed; the Waterbury Dam project (built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1935–38) flooded the remaining land. The Randall & Roberts operation predated both the settlement’s decline and the dam, and the camp on the north slope of Camel’s Hump was apparently an extension of that operation into the Bolton drainage — a logging camp for crews working the higher elevations of the watershed.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book. Green Mountain Club, 1917.
- Walsh, Kevin. Visit the ruins of Waterbury’s Little River settlement. 2010.
- Woodward, Paul and Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, . P. 84 (quoting Lewis J. Paris, M.D., on the July 1911 Bolton-to-Camel’s Hump reconnaissance), 1999.
- Yaeger, Patrick. That Beautiful Vale Above The Falls. History of the Little River settlement, Waterbury, Vermont.
