Rob Waters, Wade Rawlins and I were on a short backpacking trip, hiking north on the Appalachian Trail, when we came across a “trail letter,” a message on paper sealed in plastic to protect it from rain, addressed to “Sallylicious.”
Wade Rawlins, L, Rob Waters, my hiking partners.
The letter was laying on the trail, held in place by a rock. It was short and sweet, telling her what shelter her hiking friends were staying at that night and that they hoped to see her.
As we continued our hike we speculated on what a woman called “Sallylicious” — that was her trail name — looked like. She must be, in a word, gorgeous. We knew she was hiking south so we hoped we were about to find out, that we would meet her on the trail. And, in a few minutes, we did.
She was young but she was not beautiful.
I think about Sallylicious every now and then. Guys meeting her for the first time would not call her that. They might not call at all. But after spending months on the trail with her, hiking from Maine to the North Carolina mountains en route to Georgia, these guys had come to know her, her character, her personality, the considerable mental and physical strength she had shown on that 2,000 mile journey.
The Long Trail runs the length of Vermont, 272 miles, and, as many Vermonters know, it has its own presidential range. It’s less lofty than the more famous one over in New Hampshire, but four peaks between Breadloaf Mountain and Lincoln Gap bear the names Mount Wilson, Mount Roosevelt, Mount Cleveland and Mount Grant.
And right in the middle, between Roosevelt and Cleveland, according to the Long Trail Guide, is a lesser summit, a summit that had no name.
Rob Waters, a retired newspaperman who used to be my editor at The News & Observer, wrote this story and, just this one time, I got to edit him.
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In the summer of 1970, Rob worked on a crew to improve the Long Trail, in the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont. That four-man crew, three college students and a Navy veteran, went out on Monday mornings and returned late on Fridays, staying in trail shelters or camping during the week to be near their work.
Pat Stith (L) and Rob Waters on the A.T.
The week they worked north of Breadloaf, they carried a bag of, Rob didn’t remember exactly, it might have been chocolate bars, that contained a hand puppet. The puppet, basically a plastic bag printed with a face and with hands sticking out, was named “Little Hans.” It said so right there on the package.
Little Hans
Rob said he and his friends played with Little Hans, waving him around and making dumb jokes.
As he and the others trekked between their camp and their work sites they repeatedly crossed the summit with no name. As the week progressed, a consensus emerged that the hump between Presidents Cleveland and Roosevelt was worthy so, one evening, Ray Secor, the Navy veteran, carved a small sign that said “Little Hans Peak.” Next day, the crew attached the sign to a tree on the summit.
Rob is a lifelong hiker – in recent years I’ve hiked with him several times on the A.T. — but he hadn’t been back to Vermont much and had never revisited that section of the Long Trail. So imagine his surprise as he leafed through the September 2016 issue of “Backpacker Magazine” and saw a reference to that peak. The article recommend a peak-bagging walk in the Green Mountains from Cooley Glen Shelter to Mount Wilson and back. That hike, the article said, would take you across the summits of Cleveland and Roosevelt and, in between, a place called “Little Hans Peak.”
The name had stuck.
NOTE: See for yourself. Google “Little Hans Peak,” go to Peakbagger.com and there it will be: Little Hans Peak, Vermont, elevation 3,348 feet. Peakbagger.Com calls it an “unofficially named peak.”
