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Chris McClure lives on the slopes of the Green Mountains of
Vermont. He had, over the last three decades, come to love
"bushwacking" the hills and mountains of the Huntington Valley in
Northwest Vermont. On one uphill bushwack, he crossed the Long Trail
and decided to follow it back out to the highway. That brief hike was
the beginning of awareness about this Footpath in the Wilderness and
the people who hiked it and maintained it.
A proposal was submitted to Vermont Public Television to fund a
documentary about the Long Trail. The budget was modest but hard to
fund and the idea sat partly funded for a couple of years. McClure
decided that rather than wait any longer that he would begin an end-to
end hike from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian border, 270
miles away. McClure remembers:
I don't know what came over me. I was a below average athlete.
I was firmly entrenched in middle-age and I was not in shape.
I ordered hiking equipment from mail order and my wife drove
me to the trailhead in early June. I was a total novice and I was
very apprehensive starting that day. That first night on the Long Trail
I set up my stove upside down. Well, duh.
That was the first night of a very positive... very exciting journey
McClure had hiked two thirds of the Long Trail by September, all the way to Camel's Hump, when he got word that the documentary had been funded. For the next year, he and videographer, Ed Lalonde, shot from one end of the Long Trail to the other and edited a laid back but well paced story about the oldest long distance hiking trail in America. The result: Vermont's Hiking Trail - The Long Trail: A Footpath in the Wilderness.
Chris McClure shares his great love of the trail as he talks with both young and old who are out to end-to-end or just enjoy a day hike. Join him in this celebration of sweat, bruises, black flies and incredible beauty. Order copy now
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