How I discovered the Grand Canyon of Vermont.

• Author: Levin, Dan
• Position: Diversions

A groaner of a joke about my coastal Massachusetts town: Q: "What did the Winthrop wife say to her disappointed husband?" A: "Not tonight, dear, I have a haddock," and well she might have. You could wake up in bed with a haddock in Winthrop. TV camera crews camp on Winthrop Shore Drive during northeast storms and send out shots of mighty breakers full of seaweed, starfish, and sizeable beach stones crashing into the sea-wall, then erupting 30 feet in the air and across the Drive to smash the windows of shorefront homes. Living in Winthrop at such times can be an adventure, but so can leaving, it turns out. One wild evening in a Fall of wild weather, abandoning my car to needles of sand on the Drive, craving sand-free air and a more vividly hued landscape, I fled to my dining room and discovered the Grand Canyon of Vermont.

I hadn't planned on anything Grand. I was merely searching an old topographical map for the homes of wild brook trout. The closer the contour lines on topo maps the steeper the changes in elevation, and along the shores of one remote stream near the Appalachian Trail the lines were enticingly close. Strewn among them were figures such as 2000, as in 2000 feet of elevation. Envisioning the walls of a canyon, I called it Grand, and I pondered its curious and seemingly unnoticed existence in the gentle landscape of southern Vermont.

Once, exploring a rugged stretch of Massachusetts seacoast near Boston, I had come across a 12-foot-high natural bridge, pounded from the rocks by the sea. I was sure that no one else had ever stood inside The Doughnut, as I called it, and now I wondered about my canyon, seeing myself as some lone French fur trader paddling across 15th-century Quebec. A runaway imagination is a potent spur to adventure, and the day after my Grand discovery I fled the sea-strewn streets of Winthrop for Vermont.

The topo map showed it all, I thought--three miles of stream in the canyon, curved in the shape of a letter U that enclosed what looked like a mighty rugged tongue of land. Connecting the sides of the U was a 1.3-mile trail, my short cut to the canyon's head. I would follow the trail to its end, then descend a cliff and hike downstream between the canyon walls. What could have been more simple?

I can't say there was no trail. I found it in late morning, after two hours of wandering up and down a half dozen others that the map didn't show. It began as a scraggly clearing on the stream's far side, climbing...