The Numbers:
4 hikes to get to the 5 Vermont 4,000-footers
22.75 miles on foot
132 miles driving between trailheads
7 hrs 4 mins on trails
3 hrs 26 mins in the truck
The Trails:
Mansfield via the LT
Camels Hump via Burrows Trail
Ellen and Abraham via ski resort Ellen Peak access road, LT, and Lincoln Peak access road
Killington via Bucklin Trail
I decided to work from north to south, mainly because Jason and I are both gridding the New England Hundred Highest, and we wanted to end on Killington and then continue on to Mendon to get one more peak for my July grid. We drove up to Stowe on Friday night and slept in the truck so that we'd be ready to go "bright and early". 6:45 was the earliest we could manage, but we figured we'd still have time to finish in daylight, so that was good enough. Mansfield was pretty quiet at that hour, and the clouds were just lifting as we got to the top. It was cold and windy above treeline, but we weren't exposed long so we didn't bother with our wind jackets. The trails were very wet from all the recent rain, making the slabby rock extremely slippery, so our decent was a cautious one. Camel's Hump was busy by the time we got there, but we were able to park a short ways down the road from the trailhead. The trail here was very wet, and we did a lot of splish-splashing on our way down. Leaving Camel's Hump we had to detour around a closed road, which added an extra half an hour of driving time on the way to Ellen. We decided the most efficient way for us to do Abraham and Ellen was as a traverse between the two Sugarbush resort base stations. Jason dropped me off at the Sugarbush parking lot for Ellen Peak, and I started up the access road. He continued on just up the road to the Lincoln Peak resort and started there to do the route in the opposite direction. It was hot work climbing ski trails in the sun by this point, though on a day with a high of only 70, there wasn't much to complain about weather-wise. The LT between Ellen and Abraham definitely won the award for the muddiest trail! Jason and I crossed paths just before I got to Lincoln Peak, and by the time I finished and drove back to pick him up, he was just starting to jog down the road so the timing worked perfectly. Since it was just the two of us, and we both wanted to hit all the peaks, this traverse required us to do a little bit of extra driving, but we figured it was still faster and easier than doing an out-and-back from Lincoln Gap. At Killington we set off at a shuffle--the legs were feeling it at this point! I really wanted to make it to the top in an hour, but it ended up being 1:08. We had a celebratory Fireball shot on the summit, and then continued on to Mendon before heading down. The side trip brought our total miles and time for the day up to 27.85 and 12:21.