HipCamp: Camp Clementine
Ever since I heard about Hipcamp I’ve been hooked. Think AirBnB- but for tent sites, yurts, and glamping setups on private land. I just returned from a Hipcamp trip in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, and WOW! I don’t think I’ve ever been up to that part of Vermont, and it was simply stunning. We stayed at Camp Clementine, an orange 1975 Volkswagen Westfalia camper that had all its original camper insides.
Clementine the bus sits in a field on Ashley and Mike’s property, and has an expansive view of the mountains. Sunrise will hit you as you wake up, and you’ll see a soft glow from the sunset behind Clementine in the evening. The “camp” is stocked with a picnic table, charcoal grill, fire pit, and two bright red Adirondack chairs. There is trail cut through the field to get to a pond on their property. It’s chilly stream-fed water but perfect for a quick dip. The bathroom is in the furnished basement of their house but it is private to guests and was sparkly clean.
We arrived on Thursday afternoon and spent the rest of the day by the pond and then by the campfire. On Friday, we went to one of the recommended hikes by our hosts, Mount Pisgah. It’s located in Westmore, Vermont, and sits beside Lake Willoughby, an amazingly clear lake that you have to swim in afterwards. We started the hike from the southern end of the trail, and the first lookout you will get to this way is the South Lookout. Here, the view is insaaaane. The view is one end of the lake, looking at another mountain, and down at two small coves that look like somewhere out of the Caribbean. It is a small lookout but you can’t miss it. The summit of Mount Pisgah is an open, rocky patch, and it doesn’t feel like much of a summit. But if you go past that, there are a few more lookout points, also with amazing views. The trail has some steep points but it is gradual for much of the way as well. At some point on the way down, Simon started picking up large dead tree branches as we needed more firewood and didn’t have any cash to purchase some more roadside! It was a smart move on his part as we were able to have a great fire (and cook dinner properly) that night because of it.
When we got back down to the parking lot, we went to check out the swimming situation that we saw from the Southern lookout. It was now early afternoon and it was packed (Lake Willoughby South Cove), so we decided to find somewhere else to take a dip. There is a park by the Westmore Town Hall that sits along the lake, and luckily enough there was an opening to the lake and there we had our own private swimming hole. The water is so clear and the lake bed was nice and sandy. We also brought my Oru Kayak and both sat in it, to which I felt like we were going to sink as we were halfway paddling across the lake.
By the time we got back to camp it was time to make dinner, and we had bought some shrimp skewers and swordfish skewers at the start of our drive up. We put the charcoal grill grate over the logs and cooked the skewers that way and it worked out well. If only we had bought some marshmallows for dessert!
The next morning we packed up and left on the earlier side, around 8:30AM. We headed down to the White Mountains in New Hampshire and hiked Mount Jefferson (a NH48!) via the Caps Ridge Trail. Both Simon and I have never done this trail before. Having now completed it, I think it has to be one of my favorite hikes that I have done in the White’s! I don’t know what type of forest it was, but the start of the hike was a mossy type of forest and then it went up into the alpine zone and then a boulder field. I really enjoy the alpine zone, honestly maybe more than the summit, and you reach it rather quickly on this hike. There is a ton of scrambling to be done once in the alpine zone and at the boulders, but that’s also what makes it a fun trail. The trail head was super crowded and cars were parked down the road on either side of the parking lot entrance. The trail itself was fairly spread out with people but once you reached right below the boulder field up to the summit it was a bit more dense with people. The hike up took us around 2.5 hours (?) to summit and a little over 1.5 hours to get down. My legs are sore but it is a hike I would do over and over again!
So anyways- with my love of Hipcamp, I’m going to try to make a post that has a bunch of neat camps so that the information is all in one place. Some of them I will have been to, some of them one’s I’m looking forward to one day trying! Doing more in-depth posts about my hikes would be cool too, but I feel like I’m focusing too much on making it up the mountain in one piece than to digest my surroundings for informative trail tips :D