The second Rolston’s Rest Shelter is a post-and-beam lean-to built in August 2004 by Tom Abbott, a New Hampshire farmer and long-distance hiker who donated it to the Green Mountain Club — the third and last in his series of shelter gifts to the Long Trail. Abbott died at home one week after the shelter’s completion. The shelter stands five miles north of Sherburne Pass in Division 6, on a site that has borne Ben Rolston’s name since 1966, and sits at the center of one of the most consequential conservation victories in the history of the Long Trail.
Land Protection
Rolston’s Rest Shelter sits on land with a complicated history of ownership that long threatened the quality of the hiker experience on the Long Trail. Since 1980, the trail’s route through the property had been secured only by a narrow 200-foot-wide right-of-way acquired by the U.S. Forest Service — a legal arrangement that permitted timber harvesting within the corridor. For decades, hikers walking north from Sherburne Pass passed through active logging operations on either side of the trail.
The property changed hands more than once. At one point it was acquired by a company planning to create the largest sugaring operation in Vermont. The Trust for Public Land, which had monitored the parcel for decades as the largest private inholding in the Green Mountain National Forest, purchased the 2,692-acre property outright in 2017 when circumstances changed and the opportunity arose to prevent it from being sold and fragmented. The land encompasses eight mountain peaks, eleven miles of headwater streams, 97 acres of wetlands, the Lefferts Pond fishery, portions of the Catamount Trail, and the new Velomont Trail, in addition to the Long Trail and its shelter.
A four-season log house on the property, which had been planned as a year-round backcountry hut in partnership with the Vermont Huts Association, burned to the ground on January 16, 2018, in a suspicious fire. The Long Trail News (Spring 2018) reported that TPL and its partners were "weighing options to determine whether to replace the structure or not."
In the spring of 2023, Trust for Public Land transferred Rolston Rest to the U.S. Forest Service — the largest addition to the Green Mountain National Forest in years. The transfer imposed a 1,000-foot buffer around the Long Trail within which no commercial timber management is permitted, replacing the old 200-foot right-of-way. Mike DeBonis, GMC Executive Director, told TPL: "It was an actively managed property, and they were doing a lot of timber cutting. There was cutting on either side of the trail, so you definitely noticed it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — to have a working landscape. But as a hiker, you want to go through the woods and have a wilderness experience."
The Shelter Today
The second Rolston’s Rest Shelter continues to serve Long Trail hikers at the same mile 5.4 location it has occupied since 1966. In 2020, its privy was upgraded to a moldering (slow-composting) system, part of the GMC’s initiative to replace the trail’s remaining pit privies with more sustainable backcountry sanitation. The shelter appears in trip reports from FKT attempts, section hikers, and end-to-enders; in the winter of 2021, one FKT aspirant stopped there at 12:30 in the morning with trench foot, contemplated quitting, and recorded his reflections in the Long Trail News.
The shelter stands on land that is now fully protected federal forest. A small brook still crosses the Long Trail just south of the shelter, as it has since Ben Rolston dedicated the first structure on this site on an October morning in 1966, when the club surprised him with his name on a new lean-to, and he stood there in the Vermont woods, caught off guard and pleased.
