About the archive
The Green Mountain Club was organized in Burlington on March 11, 1910, at the call of James P. Taylor, then principal of the Vermont Academy, who gathered a small number of mountain-lovers and set out to make the Green Mountains play a larger part in the life of the state. Toward that end the Club launched The Long Trail — a footpath traversing the entire main range from Massachusetts to Canada — now the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States.
For more than a century the Club has published the Guide Book of the Long Trail: the hiker’s companion describing the trail division by division, with maps, equipment advice, stopping places, and the names of the farms, inns, and shelters that kept the trail alive. This archive preserves those editions, scanned page by page and searchable in full.
How to use the archive
- Browse — the guides page lists every edition.
- Read — each guide opens in a two-pane reader: the machine-read text beside the original scanned page. Use Text, Scan, or Text + Scan view, and the arrow keys to page forward.
- Search — the search page finds any phrase across every guide; results jump straight to the page, with matches highlighted.
- Cite — every page has a Cite this button for notes, essays, and history.
About the text
The text is produced by machine reading (OCR) of the scanned books and is presented exactly as the originals read — including their typesetting quirks and the occasional scan artifact. It is provided for search and convenience; the scanned images are the authoritative record.
A note on pagination: the books were imaged as two-page spreads, so each scanned page contains two pages of the book. The reader shows the approximate printed page numbers for each spread.
Rights
The guide books in this archive are the property of The Green Mountain Club, Inc., which publishes them here for public use. Works published in the United States before 1964 are in the public domain unless their copyright was timely renewed; the 1930 edition has passed into the public domain, and the later editions in this collection should be treated as club-held works until their terms expire.
Stewardship
The Club maintains and protects the Long Trail system, free and open to the public forever. If this archive sends you to the trail — or keeps you comfortably off it — that is exactly the point.
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