Absolutely nailed

David Hiscoe's 'America's Worst Trail: A Love Story,' in the January 2010 Backpacker magazine absolutely nails the Long Trail. Here are some quotes that combined had me laughing so hard I was in tears. I have said the Long Trail exists to beat you up. He goes one further.

'The Long Trail, I swore, is the worst damn recreational path in America.'

He has so injured himself so many times on it (the most recent shattering his ankle) that his office had two pools: 'one on how long I'd actually be gone, one on the type of injury I'd bring back.'

'Hiking this path, above all, is a miserable, dangerous experience.... As a hiking trail, it's the mother of all disasters.... A hike on the Long Trail is like some sort of bizarre vacation in a wooded Bermuda Triangle.'

'It's an eroded, ankle-torquing mess...because the folks who laid it out did not really believe that anyone would actually hike it.'

This next part is so, so true and what I found so funny (yes, my sense of humour is odd):

'On the northern two-thirds of the Long Trail — and I swear against my mother's good name that this is not an exaggeration — the next nine feet forward is as likely as not attained first by dropping down 16 feet vertically. The method of getting there is varied. There's the "Christ almighty, that's a 5.9 stretch of granite and I don't have a rope and besides folks don't usually try to climb down a pitch because gravity really throws your balance off" descent. Or the "If I grab those ragged, much-abused remains of a birch root, and slide over to that muddy place there, then throw my pack into those bushes and maybe step lightly on that wet, mossy pile of crumbling limestone, I'll only fall five or six feet" technique.... You've just knocked off another three yards... I don't remember a total of more than 30 switchbacks on the 200 miles I've covered so far. [A complaint is the descent to Route 9: aren't there any switchbacks?]

'The sons and daughters of unwed parents who constructed the LT have managed to turn the gently sloping Green Mountains into 273 miles of demonic jungle gym.'

Yes, that is the Long Trail of which we have done about 125 miles and have 150 to finish off next year.

[Burnt Rock: I have to go up that way??? Actually not but the route up does leave you awfully exposed and you wouldn't want to fall over backwards. I also realise I never posted photos from our last time out, going up and over Camels Hump... maybe later after I have raked up the leaves.]