Twin Shelters

The Twin Shelters were a pair of rustic lean-to camps built in the early 1920s to house the volunteer trail crew working on what would become the most celebrated section of the Long Trail. They stood somewhere on or near the high ridge running between Camel’s Hump and Lincoln Gap — their exact location now unknown — and served as the field headquarters for Professor Will S. Monroe and the men and women who gave summers, weekends, and boundless energy to the project he called the Monroe Skyline. By 1926, when the last relocations were finished and the ridge trail stood complete, the shelters had served their purpose. They were temporary by design, built not for passing hikers but for the builders themselves, and they disappeared with the completion of the work they were made to support.

Will Monroe and the Long Trail

William Senter Monroe was born in 1863 and spent his professional life teaching psychology at the State Normal School in Montclair, New Jersey. He also held a second home in Duxbury, Vermont, on the western shoulder of Camel’s Hump — close enough to the mountain that it shaped the course of his retirement years. He was, by all accounts, an eccentric and forceful personality, devoted to dogs, birds, mountains, and the particular quality of Vermont ridgeline light that he felt the existing trail denied its walkers.

Monroe’s connection to the Green Mountain Club began in earnest in 1916. That year he founded the New York Section of the GMC — the club’s first section drawing membership from outside Vermont — and almost simultaneously undertook the project that would define his legacy. The Long Trail as it then existed through central Vermont followed the lower contours of the mountain slopes. Monroe considered this unacceptable. The whole point of a high mountain trail, in his view, was to be on the ridge — exposed to the weather, the views, and the full vertical drama of the Green Mountains. In 1916 and 1917 he began the systematic work of relocating the trail upward, from Montclair Glen south to Lincoln-Warren Gap.

The Long Trail Guide Book’s preface, carried through dozens of editions, recorded the result simply: "In 1916 and 1917, Professor Will S. Monroe of Montclair, N.J., and Duxbury, Vt., improved the Trail from Montclair Glen to Lincoln-Warren Gap by relocating it on the ridge. The original trail largely followed the contours of the lower slopes. This is the section now known as the Monroe Skyline, and it is one of the most beautiful."

The Monroe Skyline Project

The Monroe Skyline as ultimately completed ran roughly thirty miles along Vermont’s high central ridge, traversing some of the most exposed and spectacular terrain on the Long Trail. The section crosses three of Vermont’s five 4,000-foot peaks: Camel’s Hump (4,083 feet), Lincoln Peak (4,012 feet), and Mount Ellen (4,083 feet). At the time Monroe began his work, none of this terrain was accessible by maintained trail. The ridge was raw, the forest untouched above treeline, and the project of linking the existing trail segments to this new high route required years of sustained labor — scouting, clearing, blazing, rerouting, and building — before the work was finished.

Monroe’s method was to gather crews of friends, students, and fellow club members for extended working stays on the mountain. He funded much of the work himself and organized it personally, recruiting both men and women at a time when mixed-gender trail crews were far from standard. The New York Section, which Monroe had founded specifically to support this work, paid for building materials when they were needed — though Monroe’s crews harvested what logs they could on site.

The anchor for the entire operation was Montclair Glen, the col south of Camel’s Hump where Monroe had first camped while scouting the ridgeline route. In 1917 he built the first Montclair Glen Lodge there: "an open camp with four double-deck pole bunks that can sleep twelve, stove, simple cooking utensils, excellent permanent water, fine view of the Adirondacks." He planted a flower garden beside it. From World War I and through the 1920s, the lodge served as the central base camp for Monroe and the rotating cast of friends who joined his trail seasons. It became, in the words of those who knew it, as much a social institution as a construction site.

The Twin Shelters

The Twin Shelters extended the Montclair Glen base camp logic to another location along the ridge — providing a second staging point for crews working on a different stretch of the Skyline project. A handwritten note on the back of a period photograph in the GMC archive, initialed by a later historian, records the essential facts: "a set of ‘twin’ shelters name and location unknown. A strong suggestion has been that Will Monroe had them built to serve as camps for those helping on construction of the Monroe Sky Line, one shelter for men, one for women."

The division by sex was practical — Monroe’s crews included women prominently, and separate sleeping quarters would have been the convention of the time — but it also speaks to something deliberate about Monroe’s project. He wasn’t simply building trail; he was building a community of practice, a crew culture that brought people back season after season. The Twin Shelters, like Montclair Glen, were places where that community could live and work.

Photographs from the GMC archive, dated to approximately 1920, show one of the Twin Shelters in some detail. It is a wooden frame structure with a partial open porch of rough-hewn beams — unroofed, intended perhaps as a workspace or sitting area. The main room behind it is fully boarded, weathertight, with a sheet metal roof and a stovepipe chimney visible at the left end. A large rock pile sits under a lateral overhang, likely serving as ballast or a stone supply for the construction work in progress nearby. A piece of clothing hangs from a small clothesline. The surrounding terrain is strewn with large boulders — characteristic of the talus and glacially disturbed ground of Vermont’s high ridge country — and deciduous trees stand leafless around the structure, placing the photograph in late autumn. Mountains are visible in the distance. A second photograph, labeled "Twin Shelters built by Monroe to house those building the Monroe Skyline, 1920," and a third showing four men standing in front of the shelters, confirm the pair’s shared use as worker housing.

GMC records date the Twin Shelters to 1916–1926, spanning the full active decade of the Monroe Skyline construction project. The 1916 start date aligns with Monroe’s founding of the New York Section and the beginning of his systematic ridge work; the 1926 end date marks the approximate completion of the major relocations that defined the Skyline.

The Skyline Finished, the Shelters Gone

By the mid-1920s the Monroe Skyline was essentially complete. The ridge trail from Camel’s Hump to Lincoln Gap stood where Monroe had always believed it should stand — high, exposed, rigorous, and rewarding. When the second edition of the Long Trail Guide Book was published in 1920, just ten years after the club’s founding, the trail was listed as complete from Johnson to the Massachusetts line. The Monroe Skyline was among its showpieces.

With the construction work done, the Twin Shelters lost their reason for existence. They do not appear in Long Trail Guide Books as overnight facilities for hikers, which suggests they were either removed when the project concluded or allowed to deteriorate without maintenance. Their exact location on or near the ridge has not been established from the surviving record. The handwritten note that accompanies the archive photograph acknowledges as much: the name and location are listed as unknown, the attribution to Monroe offered as a "strong suggestion" rather than a documented certainty.

What is certain is that they played a functional role in one of the Long Trail’s most consequential construction campaigns. Monroe’s Skyline project transformed thirty miles of footpath from a mid-slope meandering into a sustained ridgeline traverse — the kind of trail that James P. Taylor, who had founded the club and dreamed of a "footpath in the wilderness," had always imagined. The Twin Shelters housed the people who made that transformation possible.

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