Camel's hump adventure, Richmond, VT

On the last night of our stay in Vermont Coleen and I met a couple that had recently got engaged at the top of a mountain in Vermont called Camel's hump, they told us it was a lovely place, and we'd read about it in a hiking book and at 2.4 miles the trail was "easy", so we said, we can do that, we'll stop on our way back to Conneticut and go for a stroll.



This is the signpost at the bottom of the trail.

So, we start walking, and after about 50 minutes we come across this guy walking down with big boots, hiking sticks, the full works. He starts talking to us about his hiking sticks and he's like, "You should get some, I was on the AP and they got gnawed by a bear and the company replaced them for me free of charge" and we're standing there in our jeans and trainers looking puzzled... excuse me? the AP? He soon clarified that AP stood for the Appalachian Trail, that goes all the way from Maine to Georgia.


Here's the itinerary if anyone is interested in doing it...

We ask him how much longer it is to the top, and he's like, oh well at least another hour and a half, and we think if this guy, who is clearly a pro takes an hour and half how long is it going to take us? But we're no quitters, so we said, let's just keep going, it can't be that far. After about 30 minutes more, and a few false alarms of seeing black bears behind trees, a woman comes running down the trail, this was our conversation:

"Coming down eh?"

to be read in a German accent:

"Oh ya, I am not tired enough so I run down and back up again, and like this I will catch up with my group"

"Oh, I see"

German accent: "It is too easy for me"

"Oh, yes, too, easy, absolutely..."

This was our reaction when the German woman ran past us:



Anyway, so after we got over our laughing fit, we thought we have to do this, we have to keep going, it really can't be that hard.

We kept walking and just when we thought we were about to get to the top and thought it surely can't be that far away, another group of professional hikers comes past and says,it's only an hour and a half more!!!??!?

By this time we had been hiking for about 2 hours, we had had no lunch, our water was running out and it was raining, so after talking to a man that said he had found it hard to breathe at the summit we decided it was time to walk down.

It took us just as long to walk down to the car park, and after a mini adventure involving a box of wet wipes nearly falling down a portaloo (I shall say no more) and another fit of histerical laughter we finally made it into the village where we found a bakery serving vegan cupcakes (they were soooo good)



Thanks to someone else's effort and the wonders of the internet I can show you the view from the top of Camel's Hump.