Sunday, December 6, 2015

Mt Philo (dough)

Our final peak of the weekend was Mt Philo in Charlotte VT.  The 980’ peak is the home of the oldest state park in Vermont.  We parked in the lot and were surprised by how many cars were there, apparently this is a very popular place to go for a walk.  The main trail starts at 389’ and is quite run-able.  There aren’t too many rough spots and they even have some wooden stairs built.  The main trail (blue) hits the access road where you descend just a bit before re-entering the trail.  At that point we had a choice between the Devil’s Chair trail and the main Overlook trail. Since we figured we’d be up again we took the main trail and were standing on the top 14 minutes after we’d started.  There were some nice views from the cliffs.  We could see Lake Champlain and quite a few mountains in NY (including the one we’d done earlier that day).  We continued off the summit and took the paved access road down to 613’ where we met the “up” road and linked back onto that.  From that point we hit the blue trail again and this time ran the Devil’s Chair trail. This was a little less run-able.  There were some cool little caves and we got to run right under the summit cliffs.  Devil’s Chair topped out at 935’ then we headed down to catch the access road again.  We ran back up to the top which we reached in just over 40 minutes (and just under 3 miles).  Then we just zipped down the 1.2 miles on the road to our starting point.  In all we got in 5.2 miles in 52:34 (with stops included).

 




I’d like to go back to this one and maybe even camp.  I bet there would be some great sunrises or sunsets from the summit. 

 

1 comment:

Bob Johnson said...

My wife and I hiked this one in the rain a few years back during a week long stay in VT. Nice little park.