Stowe, Thursday, July 31, 2025
Up bright and early and right into the pool! After the usual bout of reading, we headed into town for lunch at American Flatbread. Service was a bit slow at first, raising fears of a reprise of our last visit (when it took so long to get our food that the entire meal was comped), but things soon picked up. My drink, a low-alcohol cider from Stowe Cider, brought back pleasant memories of quaffing this beverage with friends in Cornwall. Salad and mini flatbreads set us up nicely for the hiking rigors to come.
We bounced and slalomed our way up the Mansfield toll road, which now costs a cool fifty bucks for car and one passenger!
As we ascended, we passed a fanciful gate on the way up. We thought the grandkids would have gotten a kick out of this!
The only real trick on the toll road is getting around the many blind corners; there is seldom room for two cars to pass, and you just have to pray that some yahoo isn’t flying down from above! As you near the top, views down onto Stowe valley open up. That’s the house at the top of the gondola in the distance.
Mansfield has a very long summit ridge which looks very much like a human head in repose from the valley below.
The toll road terminates just below the cliffs at the right side of the nose; there is a small visitors center and occasionally a caretaker to provide information. The path, which follows the Long Trail here, leads from the Nose, over the knobs called the Upper and Lower Lips, and up onto the Chin, the actual summit and the highest point in Vermont at 4,393 feet. Here’s the view looking back to the Nose and the Visitors Center.
We didn’t have the greatest day, with overcast skies, but the views were still spectacular. This is the view looking south; the shadowy peak in the far distance directly above Sue’s head is Mt. Abraham, the fifth highest mountain in Vermont.
We climbed Abraham with Tobie and Mia in 2015; here are the little devils back then, outside a lovely, rustic Airbnb that we had rented.
The views to the west are virtually endless, reaching out over Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks deep into New York.
And this is the view north, blocked off by the summit knob itself.
It isn’t a long hike, a bit more than a mile and a half, and the first mile is a snap, as you move alternately through the scrub forest you see here and over ledges that afford the great views.
As you begin to climb over the lips, though, the walk turns into a scramble, with a good bit of hand over hand work, considerable exposure (steep drops) to the left, and sizable crevices between the boulders we were scrambling over. We made it over the two lip knobs, but no further. Both of us have noticed that our balance has gotten worse as we’ve grown older, and this is particularly the case with me. For the first time ever, I wasn’t confident scrambling over the rough ground, and, perhaps also for the first time ever, I exercised a bit of good judgment and told Sue that I didn’t feel safe going further–I had no desire to break a leg! This is the last 1/4 mile to the top…and where we turned around.
The scramble back down onto leveler ground took a while, but we were soon cruising back to the Visitors Center and the car. The road down was a bit easier than coming up, since there was no uphill traffic so late in the day.
Dinner was a variety of Vermont cheeses, a baguette, and a nice salad! And we had company for dinner: a pair of groundhogs were chowing down right outside the window of our dining alcove.
