After canceling my last several scheduled trips due to rain, I took advantage of a good weather forecast to schedule a meetup trip for Bamforth Ridge. The plan was to go from the Winooski River to the summit and down Monroe Trail. Since no one else joined me I brought a bicycle so I could park at the Monroe trailhead, bicycle down to the LT trailhead by the Winooski, and walk back to the car. I started bicycling down around 10 AM, but unfortunately my tire blew out 1.8 miles down the road. So I stashed my bicycle in the woods, walked back up, and switched to plan B.

I started up Dean Trail around 11 AM, did a loop of Allis trail and the LT, headed up the LT to the Camels Hump summit, and then went down to the hut clearing. Along the way I met a lot of other people taking advantage of the nice day, including a rare Montrealer whose English was worse than my very poor French, to whom I was able to haltingly give some information about the trail. Since I’d never hiked the northern end of the Alpine Trail in my 40+ trips up Camels Hump I decided this was a good day for it, so I went down Bamforth Ridge to the Alpine Trail junction and took it back to the Monroe Trail junction.

The Alpine trail is one of the rare LT side trails that is not blazed in blue; it’s blazes are yellow. The northern portion is obviously lightly traveled, but had some nice stretches of open rock with some views of Camels Hump above. I then headed back to the car, getting there a little after 4 PM.

Leader and sole participant: David Hathaway