Agile Trekker: VT Appalachian Trail - Section 3 - Stony Brook Road to Shelburne Pass Trail (Inn at the Long Trail)

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
10/13/2017	9.3 miles	4 hours 44 minutes	2,340'

Map: New Hampshire-Vermont Appalachian Trail Guide and maps that come with it

Parking: Leave first car at Stony Brook Road. Leave second car in parking lot on right side of the Inn at the Long Trail

Directions: Take Shelburne Pass Trail to the AT. Turn right (northbound) onto the AT and hike to bridge crossing at Stony Brook. Turn left onto Stony Brook Road (before the bridge) to parking area.

Our map showed parking on Stony Brook Road. We read that the road quality "deteriorates" the last 3/4 of a mile. Hmm. Guthook didn't even mention the possibility of parking on the road. Sometimes it feels like backpacking would just be easier. So, we've made this mistake at least 3 times now. We rented a normal sedan. It had low clearance. Lower than our minivan. Ugh. Our first mistake of the day was to plug in the GPS coordinates of where our parking area was. Our GPS didn't take us there. It took us to another place where the trail crossed a road, and told us to continue by walking a FEW miles to our start place. What? So, we had to manually navigate using our map. That added at least another 1/2 hour of driving. We turned onto Stony Brook Road from Route 107. There was a sign at the start of the road saying not to use your GPS, because it is useless here. Umm, yep. Stony Brook Road starts out as a nice dirt road. It's actually quite a long road - maybe 4 miles. There are some side roads, not always with signs. We just kept going straight (which ended up being correct). Some of the houses on the road were quite nice, but I'd never want to live there (driving on that road in winter would just suck). The road became a one lane road. At some point the road started getting worse. We had to slow down to a crawl to make sure rocks didn't hit the bottom of the cars (especially the sedan). We reached a sign for the Les Newall area, and at that point there were deep puddles and ruts in the road. There was a grassy area with space for 3 cars or so right before the sign. I told Glen to park there and not go any further. I hit the bottom of my minivan trying to turn around, but luckily it was just on dirt. I wasn't happy with parking there, but at this point there was no benefit of trying somewhere else. We drove our minivan to the Inn at the Long Trail, and parked at the parking lot just to the right of the inn (on the same side of the street).

Glen had accidentally forgotten to change his pants this morning. He has been going down to the hotel breakfast in jeans (clean) and changing into his hiking pants (dirty) after breakfast. Today he forgot, so he was hiking in jeans. Luckily there was no chance of rain, so he was okay.

We headed up the Sherburne Pass Trail, and turned right onto the AT. The hiking started out easy on the AT. We walked through Gifford Woods State Park. I managed to trip and fall twice. Even with trekking poles, I can fall a lot. The park was nice, and had hiker amenities. Always nice to see when businesses support thru hikers. We crossed over Route 100 and passed by Kent Pond. We continued on and took a short side trail the Thundering Falls. Even though I wasn't in a good mood today (parking stress, cranky about falling), I was really happy with how strong my body felt. My hip felt good, I had energy, things were going well (despite falling). We took a short break at River Road. Immediately after that we started climbing. I no longer felt strong and energetic. The climb was just switchback after switchback, and I felt drained. And I tripped and fell a third time. At the end, we hiked downhill, passed the Stony Brook Shelter, then arrived at Stony Brook. There was a woman standing there waiting to pick up some hikers. I was curious where she had parked. Stony Brook Road does intersect the trail, but it is not passable at that point by non-high clearance vehicles. We had about a 1/2 mile walk on Stony Brook Road to where we had parked. The other woman also had a regular car, and had parked next to us. We drove out slowly - I was happy to get back onto real road!