Taking The Long Trail, One Step At A Time

By Jeff White

He had tried to hike the length of Vermont once before, but his pack was too heavy, and he didn’t even make it 100 miles.

This summer, 20 years and 265 miles later, Henry Marshall donned a lighter pack and newly sewn confidence and completed his trudge the length of Vermont’s Long Trail, at a road appropriately named Journey’s End.

“This year I decided I was going to do it,” Mr Marshall, 49, recalls, sitting in the living room of his Berkshire road home. “You know I’m getting older, and I thought `if I don’t do it now, I’m going to miss out.’ I mean, you gotta take charge of your life.”

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do. It has always been there,” he adds.

The lure of hiking has coursed through Mr Marshall’s veins since 1976, when he trekked 10 days into the Shashonie National Forest in Wyoming. Although he backpacked consistently throughout the 1970s, he took a hiatus from the sport through most of the 1980s. He will tell you that the Long Trail is the most severe hike he has ever attempted.

Next to the famed Appalachian Trail, Vermont’s Long Trail is New England’s most celebrated hike, stretching from far below Lake Hancock in the south to the Canadian border.

It throws a varied landscape at those intent on walking it. Gentle, green rolling hills give way to the significant peaks of Stratton, Killington and Mount Mansfield. Clear, placid lakes yield to craggy boulder fields. The trail is at times well maintained and clear, at times rocky and laden with roots.

In short, the trail has its ups and downs; its length challenges the hiker to take each variation in stride. Henry Marshall took a month off work, and on July 17, he marched into the Long Trail’s variable folds.

An accountant by trade, he is an unassuming man, rail-thin with glasses and cropped graying hair. But behind his quiet demeanor rests a sharp awareness of his goals and the importance of attacking them.

In retrospect, Mr Marshall recalls, making the decision to take on the Long Trail was easy; he had arrived at a stage in his life when he was determined not to let goals fall by the wayside. Achieving an aspiration that had been roiling beneath his skin for 20 years was just a matter of walking into Vermont’s backcountry.

“Someplace in the last spring or something I realized that life is going by, and if you don’t do [the hike], it’s not going to happen for you,” he says. “I don’t know. Somehow I was able to make that little shift between security and desire to actually live my life.”

Taking On The Trail

For the first 100 miles, the Appalachian trail runs in tandem to the Long Trail before hanging a sharp right at Sherburne pass, cutting its way through New Hampshire’s White Mountains on its way to Maine’s Mount Katahdin.

The Long Trail is left on its own to meander due north. The initial miles after its split with the AT are punctuated by gnarled, mangled trees, defenseless victims of a region-wide ice storm several years past; they are left to resemble bare stick figures with bony arms unable to sprout a single bud.

It was here that the isolation of a big hike started to chip away at Henry Marshall’s resolve. The brush around him grew high and dense for the lack of an overhead canopy. Trudging through the humid air that coats one’s face with a layer of insects, he thought seriously about quitting.

“It was overgrown, it was really hard going, and I missed [the AT hikers]. It was like I really felt like I was on my own there, and I hated that section,” he recalls. “I didn’t like the trail. I didn’t like the feel of it. I didn’t see anybody. I was really tired. I just got discouraged there.  

“I kind of thought at that point, `hey, you know what? I’ve hiked 10 days or something, I’ve made a lot of friends, I had an awful lot of fun, maybe that’s enough. Do I really need to go further? Does it matter if I go all the way to the end or not?’”

It was a question Mr Marshall wrestled with for most of the hike. He had decided to prepare for the journey a little differently from his past effort, opting to go without a sleeping bag, stove and tent to conserve pack weight. Well into his hike, Mr Marshall even shipped home his rain gear to lighten his load. “When I want to do a trip, I have to be willing to go light and accept a fair amount of discomfort,” he said.

Still, early on, Mr Marshall didn’t have the trail’s end as his ultimate goal.

“When I started I had sort of set doing the trail as a goal, but I only looked at that as a framework within which I was working,” he says. “I didn’t say exactly how long I was going to go for. I thought, `well I’m going to try for the end, but basically I’m going to get out there on the trail and just start hiking and see what happens.’”

He might have given up that day north of Killington, 100 miles into the hike, had it not been for Doug and Mike, middle-aged hikers Mr Marshall met as he slogged into a campground.

“For me, the thing that kept me going were the other people that I met. I think one of the things I was struggling with was that I couldn’t keep up with the younger guys. I just didn’t have the strength to do it. But I was trying to keep up with them. Maybe that was part of the reason I got discouraged.

“[Doug and Mike] were my age, and they said, ‘hey, you know what? It’s just cool to be out here.’” Mr Marshall realized that it wasn’t the end that was important, it was the journey. The next day he donned his pack and continued up the trail.

Still, Mr Marshall reckons there was a point in the trek when he crossed an invisible line in his subconscious and started to honestly care whether he completed the walk. He fell into the hypnotic trance of trail life, when days blend seamlessly together, and one begins to realize that by staying focused and plowing through the trail, one’s body can survive the wear and tear. Simply put, one realizes that the end can be gained slowly and steadily.

“Yeah, somewhere in there I got this bug that it was important to finish. I got this sort of issue of determination and ‘have I got what it takes?’ and I got into that.”

Wet and almost out of food, on one of those soggy, fog-laden days that seem to roll over northern Vermont during the summer, Henry Marshall arrived at the summit of Mount Mansfield, and knew he was going to make it. “After I got through that gray day, I knew I’d make it to the end. It was just a question of doing it.”

Twenty-five days after setting out, he did just that, reaching the Long Trail’s northern terminus, just over the Canadian border.

Applying The Trail To Life

Like all good adventures, the impact of Henry Marshall’s Long Trail hike slowly came to him in the weeks following his return. Maybe some of the specific sights and smells have begun to fade away, like campfire smoke in the wind. But sitting in his small living room on a blustery late afternoon, he knows that lessons from the trail, from a journey embraced and completed, can mean more in his everyday life.

“I think one of the really interesting things about the hike was the opportunity to see the whole process of achieving a goal, because you have a nice finite accomplishment, and you watch your mind sort of going through the process of struggling,” he remembers.

“One of the reasons that I have always loved hiking is that you learn stuff about yourself. One of the first things I learned from long backpacking trips is that however difficult it is, it’s one step at a time. If you just keep putting that step out there, one after another after another, you get to the top of the mountain or you get to the end of the trail.

“[This realization] reinforces the ability to accomplish a goal, because when I’m working on a difficult and boring project I say `hey, one step at a time.’ That’s the way life is, though; you just keep plugging away. Persistence is the key to success, and you can see that when you’re hiking.”

Off the trail, Henry Marshall attacks the various goals he sets for himself in much the same way as he stormed the Long Trail: one step at a time. “That’s what it’s all about. It’s persistence. If you could accomplish that, you can accomplish any goal that you set your mind to in that way. It works at work, it works in your relationships, everything; it’s just one step at a time. You just do it.”

Perhaps the most important lesson to be taken from Henry Marshall’s trail experience is how much Vermont’s Long Trail, with its characteristic ups and downs, twists and turns, resembles the long trail of life. Mr Marshall is quite conscious of this similarity, and he now knows, perhaps more than ever, that traveling light through life is as important as traveling light in the backcountry.

“I was rich at one time, and I lost it all, and what I learned from that was it’s not that big of a deal. It’s just stuff. I’m still the same. And in some ways I’m better now without the stuff than when I had it. I’m a lot lighter. You don’t need that much.

“The difference is that as you get older, you sort of get a sense that life is finite, that sense of the end becomes more real.

“Being the person I want to be seems a lot more important than having stuff, more things, more money. That stuff doesn’t really matter.”

Until the next adventure, Henry Marshall will remain content with his weekend sojourns to area campgrounds, where he escapes to get back some tinge of trail life.

“I had a good moment, and turned it into this hike. I had a sense of confidence, I had a sense of `I’m going to do this; this is something I want to do. I’m going to do it.’ And there will be something else.”