How to get there: Leave Middlebury heading north on Route 23 (Weybridge Street). Stay on Route 23 right through "downtown" Weybridge, and when road dead-ends into Route 17 turn left (now heading west). After about three miles (you'll skirt the north end of Snake Mountain on the way), turn left (south) onto Mountain Road. About three miles south on Mountain Road is a parking area on the right hand side; trailhead is across the road and a little bit south of the parking lot.

Natural and human history is encrusted in each layer of Snake Mountain's re-crystallized rock. The four summits that reach across the mountain's serpentine ridgeline once rose from Glacial Lake Champlain, which drowned the Champlain Basin when a climate change melted the glaciers of the Pliestocene Epoch, approximately 15,000 years ago; the skeleton of a whale was once found buried in the sand on one of the mountain's slopes. The whispers of ghosts hang above the twisting trail, and stir in the ruins scattered throughout the woods. The mountain is haunted by shadows of the past, and yet -- standing 1281 feet above the Champlain Valley -- you may feel utterly alone, and let your mind soar on the wings of migrating raptors. The men and women who once squeezed life, profit and tourist recreation from the rising slopes of this landform, have since abandoned them, leaving the view of Lake Champlain and watercolor-blue silhouettes of the Adirondacks only to those hikers who make it to the top of the ridge.

The trailhead is nestled by the foot of the hill at the junction of the unpaved Wilmarth and Mountain Roads. Beyond the orange gate, the roughly two mile blue blazed trail follows a woods road north, through long-deserted farm fields reclaimed by sugar maples and beech trees. The branches of a few of the older trees stretch sideways, rather than vertically towards the peppered light; this is a handicap they have to shoulder in the new, forested landscape, where trees must reach towards the sky to avoid competition with neighbors. The paper-smooth gray bark of the birch trees glows against the dark woods; strips of peeling skin curl away from the trunks of shagbark hickory trees.

After about a half mile the trail is enveloped in a thicket of jewelweed. By the end of the summer, the ripe pods of these leafy plants will explode with the slightest touch, spewing tiny white seeds from a shriveling green curlicue. At this point, the trail comes to a junction on the left with an old carriage road. At the end of the last century, the carriage road led up to the Grand View House, one of many mountaintop hotels in Vermont. When the hotel was built in 1870, the name of the mountain was changed to Grand View Mountain; for the price of a dime, visitors could climb a 68-foot observation tower and take in an unexcelled vista that encompassed the old forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, South Bay, Lake George, Lake Champlain, the Green Mountains from near Massachussets on the south to their northern terminus in Canada, and the Adirondak mountains from Fort Edward on the Hudson River to their northern terminus. The house closed in 1925 as lake resorts drew business into the valley and automobiles, which could not make it up the steep, muddy carriage road, came into general use. Today, the abandoned road, which zigzags up the side of the mountain, is split by freezing water and crumbles between struggling roots.

If you turn right and walk 100 feet away from the intersection of the logging trail and carriage road, you will come across the ruins of an old farm. Piles of bricks and rusting tools lay scattered around a corroding foundation and a cistern ringed in flat rocks, sinking deeper each season into the ever-thickening woods. Sheep were almost certainly raised here, once; during the 19th century, sheep farming was a pillar of the economy in Addison County, which, in 1837, recorded a population of 260,000 sheep. However, Australia’s entrance into the wool market led to a rapid decline in sheep farming and small, failing farms like this one were deserted and donated to the creeping forest.

Past the intersection, the trail climbs more steeply northward along a small stream running quietly in the opposite direction from your own. In the late spring, the floor of the deciduous woods blanketing the rising slopes here explodes with flowering herbs. The stems of the flowered bellworts rise to your knees, bend, and droop low under their heavy ovate leaves and lemon-colored, bell-shaped flowers. Clusters of sweet cicely buds twitch in the breeze and shining white bloodroot flowers wobble on red, veiny stems. In June, Solomon’s Seals splatter the forest with blood-red berries. The trail continues to climb up this steep face of the mountain, swinging right and then left, before unfolding across a small plateau. It tunnels through the shade of birch trees -- some marked with the carved initials of yesterday’s hikers. The trail emerges from the plateau to proceed steeply to the right, continuing to wind uphill through moss-covered outcrops of metamorphic rock.

The Monkton quartzite that lies beneath the thin topsoil on Snake Mountain began as sand deposited in the sea; over hundreds of million of years, compaction and cementation of the sand created solid rock. About 1300 million years ago, converging convection currents deep in the earth’s interior caused the overlying continental plates to move towards each other, closing the ocean basin. As the continental plates collided, tremendous compressional forces crumpled the earth’s crust, pushing the sedimentary rock on the ocean floor upward to form the mountains and valleys that characterize the Vermont landscape. This period of high pressure re-crystallized the rocks buried within the climbing mountains, metamorphosing the sandstone into the harder, more weather-resistant quartzite, which now peeks through clumpy moss on each side of the hiking trail.

After weaving uphill through red oaks and serviceberry trees, you will reach the abrupt edge of the summit. Snake Mountain is one of many "sheep-back" mountains in the Champlain Valley; just as the bent head of a sheep rises gradually to a blunt backside, many of the Green Mountains have very gradual eastern slopes and very steep western slopes. When tectonic plate movement once again began to close the proto-Atlantic Ocean basin four hundred and forty five million years ago, an intense period of folding and faulting, followed by fractures, pushed many rocks westward. Such a shift created the cliffs that fall from Snake Mountain’s western summit edge. This steep west slope is maintained as the weaker rock layer of Stony Point Shale beneath the harder Monkton Quartzite is weathered away, causing the cliff to repeatedly collapse.

The top of the mountain, where the trail meets the cliff's sheer edge, is covered with a concrete slab – the foundation of a private dwelling that was never built. The man who envisioned awakening daily to gaze down at this quilt of corn-and-hayfields- sprinkled-with-Holstien-cows was drafted and killed in the Second World War. He must have carried the view of a calm and gray Lake Champlain settled between the folds of Vermont’s landscape with him across the Atlantic. Perhaps the hawks and turkey vultures that ride the thermal air currents just beneath the cliffs on perfect September days soared through his dreams. Now, the hikers who climb to the end of the trail may carry these visions with them as they retrace their steps back to Mountain Road.

The woods of Snake Mountain have been cleared by man and grazed by sheep; its "Grand View" has been displayed for tourists paying a nightly fee; a portion of its summit has been flattened under cement; and its trees have been notched and autographed by long-forgotten passers-by. Yet, all of the shadowy figures on Snake Mountain from a time past have since gone away for one reason or another, and the encroaching forest is gradually burying their prints.

If you are lucky and choose the right time of day, or the right time of year, you may have a few hours on the abandoned mountain completely to yourself. You may walk up Snake Mountain and know what it is like to hang in the air with snow; to hear only the wind; to be so high above the ground you feel as if you have momentarily stepped above the earth just to have a look around. Once the sun has sunken far below your feet -- behind the towering Adirondacks -- you may still be able to make it down the trail before darkness settles in for a chilly Vermont night on a mountain haunted by the gaiety of 19th century tourists, a lost lifestyle, and an unfulfilled dream.

By Catherine DiBenedetto