GLASTENBURY MOUNTAIN -- Long, curved hoofprints mark the squishy mud on the trail in front of us. Fresh moose tracks.

A young moose explodes out of the woods, close enough to make us duck. It runs in a crazy circle, snorting, shaking its head, trying to escape the flies. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the young moose crashes off into the woods again.

Welcome to Vermont's Long Trail, the nation's oldest long-distance hiking path, stretching 269 miles from Massachusetts to Quebec along the spine of the Green Mountains. In the eight decades since it was conceived, the Long Trail has gone from a rough-hewn path to a route so well-traveled that hikers' boots have worn a groove into the earth. More than 40,000 people hiked Mount Mansfield last summer; thousands more sampled other parts of the trail for an afternoon or a week.

The trail has become one of Vermont's most enduring icons, a symbol of the high value Vermonters put on enjoying their natural environment. Today, I'm one of those wilderness-seekers, the first in a relay of Free Press reporters who will spend the summer hiking the trail.

Along the way, we'll write about the people we meet: the hikers, the nature lovers and the volunteers who maintain and protect the trail. We'll describe how the Long Trail is a window on Vermont in the 1990's, offering a view from the mountaintops, at foot pace, of environmental and growth-and-development issues facing all of Vermont.

On some mountains, ski areas and hikers vie for the right to use state and federal land. Elsewhere, the Long Trail has been displaced by second-home development or by landowners who don't want hikers on their property. Some mountains are periodically wrapped in pollution haze from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest.

All this has led me to a little clearing on the Vermont-Massachusetts border, where the Long Trail starts. And then, to head north.

One foot in front of the other

You have to hike to the beginning of the Long Trail. A three-mile walk from Williamstown, Mass., brings you to a room-sized clearing where trail signs nailed to beech trees tell of the footpath ahead.

I lift my 35-pound pack to take the first steps of our journey. Inside, I've got the basics: a sleeping bag, pad, warm clothes and wool hat, a cook set, a first aid kit, a bag of personal items like a toothbrush and dental floss, a water filter, a quart water bottle, toilet paper, lots of matches, and my reporter's necessities. Oh, and several sections of the Sunday New York Times, plus a 20-ounce bottle of caffeine-laden soda that snuck its way into my pack at the last moment. My husband, Rick, has the tent, all our food and his personal gear.

By its very nature, the Long Trail demands self-sufficiency and simplicity. It is a physical challenge, where everything you will need must be carried on your back, and up and down mountainsides. That challenge has drawn everyone from the 1969 U.S. Olympic Cross Country Ski Team, which ran the trail in 10 days, to a woman school teacher in the 1940s who took eight summers to hike the entire trail.

And it attracted David Winter who hiked the Long Trail by himself in 1974, when he was 14 years old.

''I was a handful, pretty headstrong,'' he said recently, recalling his days as a teen-age hiker. ''This was something positive that I could do, it was a push in the right direction. I think it was good for me to live out of a backpack without the living room and the TV, and all the extraneous stuff from society that doesn't really mean anything.''

Our hike begins on a muggy day, with hazy sunshine. Soon, the weight of the packs and the exertion of walking has us covered with sweat. My shirt soaks through.

The air is pungent with the rich, earthy armoa of a tropical greenhouse. The only sounds are the crunch of our boots, the rhythmic glugg-glugging of the water in my water bottle, and the occasional bell-like call of a wood thrush.

Around us, young chestnuts sprout from their dying parents; chestnut oaks abound. Swamp azaleas dot the hillside, with a trumpet-shaped pink flower that's so deliciously aromatic Rick stops to sniff every one. On a south-facing slope we find another prize: mountain laurel, the buds of its full, creamy pink flowers just a few days away from bloom.

Three miles up the trail sits Seth Warner shelter, our destination for the evening. We arrive at the three-sided structure by 3 p.m., just as the skies begin to tremble with thunder and lightning.

Day 2: A walk in the rain

Walking in a warm summer rain takes a certain mindset. To enjoy it, you need dry socks and dry clothing at day's end. On this second morning, when we'll walk 11.5 miles from Seth Warner shelter to Vermont 9 west of Bennington, I'm ready.

The rain and mist transform the landscape into a mysterious place, like the Scottish moors.

The world closes in, and you focus on the things nearest at hand: the Lilliputian vegetation at your feet, the peach-colored carpet of leaves on the path, birdcalls that break the silence. The rain paints every leaf and flower with a satin gloss. The greens go deep and radiant.

The Long Trail offers a way to put aside the routine of everyday life and a chance for contemplation. You have to travel slowly, and look at things closely. Whether it's the beauty of a summit sunset or the ugliness of trailside litter, it's all there to see when walking the slow, steady pace the trail demands.

By 9 a.m., we've been walking several hours, and we drop down a steep hill where the trees suddenly open on a beaver pond. In the mist, it's impossible to tell where the pond ends and the sky begins. Long tendrils of mist drape across the spruce and firs at the far side of the water. Mats of vegetation look like tiny islands floating in the sky; like ghosts, they disappear and reappear in the mist. The pond edge recedes into eternity.

The banjo-twang call of green frogs fills the air. They fall silent as we walk the perimeter of the pond to the six-foot high beaver dam from which drains the Roaring Branch river.

As the sun climbs higher in the sky, the mist recedes and by noon, the rain is gone and it's hot. We top out on Harmon Hill, 12.5 miles from the beginning of the trail.

To the west, the gray spike of the Bennington Battle Monument pierces the wisps of clouds. With the heat come the blackflies, so we move on quickly.

Day 3: A long way up

People come to the Long Trail for every conceivable reason. Some come for solitude. Boy Scouts come in droves to earn merit badges. People have come on their honeymoons. Others come to recover from a personal loss. Some have even come to die.

Bob the River Bum greets us on our late-afternoon arrival at Goddard Shelter. It's nearly 30 miles from the beginning of the Long Trail, and 10 miles from the nearest road to reach this roomy three-sided structure made of huge, blond peeled logs. We have climbed slowly up from Vermont 9, on a long ridge of beech and yellow birch. At the road, we were joined by Paul Hannan, president of the Green Mountain Club.

Bob - better known back home in Marietta, Ohio, as Bob Henthorne - is hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail, the 2,100-mile-long trail from Georgia to Maine. The Appalachian Trail and the Long Trail travel the same path for 100 miles north of the Massachusetts border. Since 1988, the 58-year-old truck driver has hiked much of the Appalachian Trail in month-long summer vacations. Bob says he has never seen anything quite as ferocious as the black flies that cluster around his head like frantic electrons.

He waves his red Carolina Trucking hat, rakes his gnarled fingers through his hair and resets his hat. ''You don't suppose you could spare some of that bug dope you got there?'' he asks us in a quiet drawl. ''I've had bugs be a nuisance, but nothing like this.''

We, too, have been battling the bugs as we have climbed. The tiny blackflies and their larger cousins, the deer flies, were hungry after two days of rain and fog. On this day, they have pursued us through sweet-smelling balsam fir and spruce forests. They thwarted our efforts to enjoy the view at Porcupine Lookout, where the woods open up to a vista of ridge after ridge of bottle-green mountains. They buzzed in our ears as we contemplated the mysterious, twisted beech forests that cap the ridgeline. In short, the bugs are a goad to motion. Sit still, and they converge. Walking is the only way to stay sane.

Why hike?

Like many who chose to hike the Long Trail, Bob can't say exactly why he left his wife and his dog to swat bugs on a remote mountaintop.

''I wanted to spend 30 days on the trail to see what it was like,'' he said of his first trip in 1988. ''My family thinks I'm nuts. They are for it, but they can't understand why I do it. I can't either,'' he added. For other hikers over the decades, the experience has been everything from a physical challenge to a mental uplift.

''Why do it? We just got caught up in the challenge of the trail being there and got in deeper with each section tackled,'' wrote Bob O'Malley, of Holyoke, Mass. of his end-to-end hike completed in 1967 with his 13-year-old son, Sean.

A 10-year old hiker from Hinsdale, Illinois, John Wright, put it this way in 1940: ''I like mountains. I like the way they make you feel. I like the way I felt on top of the Nose (on Mount Mansfield). As if I were free, and could do anything.''

Fred Mould of Morrisville set off on June 10, 1950 to climb Mount Sterling. He was 81 years old and wanted to die while hiking. Two-and-a-half miles from the road, he died.

''He kept climbing to the last moment,'' an article in the Free Press said. ''That was important to him. He knew that some day his body would wear out and his heart would stop. But that didn't worry him provided his spirit kept strong to the end.''

Day 4: Trash on the trail

The Long Trail is an escape from daily life, but not from the problems of modern life. On our final day, we amble over Glastenbury Mountain, stopping to climb the rickety fire tower on the top. It's the only way to see the view, which is spectacular.

The valleys are full of morning mist. To the east, Somerset Reservoir glints like a newly minted dime. Stratton Mountain looms in the north, Equinox and the Taconic Range lie to the south. From this fire tower, it's said you can see more wilderness than from anywhere else on the Long Trail.

There's not a sign of civilization anywhere on the horizon. You are only reminded of humans when you look below the tower. Beer cans, old toilet paper, soggy yellow spark plug boxes - we fill a garbage bag. This mountain is 10 miles from the road, but there is a snowmobile trail right to the top.

Yesterday, as we slogged our way up through the humid air to Goddard Shelter, we looked out on vistas that were smudged by haze. Some of the haze is from humidity, but Vermont researchers have shown when the wind blows from the south, it brings a soup of pollutants from cars, factories, and coal and oil-fired power plants.

More often, however, the Long Trail offers unexpected bits of wilderness, like the moose that greets us on the side of Glastenbury Mountain, or the cacophony of bird calls that wakes us at 5 a.m. each day.

The last leg of our hike is over rolling terrain, with a few beaver ponds dotted along the trail like pearls on a string. By mid-afternoon, we've reached the road and our cars. It's sad to finish, but I'll be happy to return to my children.

As I load my pack in the car, I think of the words of Violet May Hall, a West Lebanon, N.H., school teacher who took eight summers in 1940s to hike the trail.

''Now I have finished, I almost wish I hadn't,'' she wrote. ''I should like to start all over again and do it again, and maybe I shall. All together, the Long Trail is as near to heaven as most of us get in this life.''