Bikepacking Vermontshire: Part 2

September 29, 2024

For this year's bike tour, Meg and I rode our ATBs from Littleton, New Hampshire, in a loop around Vermont, and back to New Hampshire. Along the way, we checked out some new spots, and visited some old favourites. We connected it all with a collection of class 4 roads, singletrack, dirt roads, and -- occasional -- pavement.

After a fitful sleep in the noisy forest, we woke up to a surprisingly warm morning with clouds so low I was surprised we didn't wake up in a cloud.

Before leaving the campsite, I enjoyed a hearty breakfast of peanut butter and trail mix wrapped within a flour tortilla. Perhaps not the healthiest breakfast option, but probably better than the honey buns (fun fact: a popular prison currency) provided by my elementary school breakfast cart. And when you're riding loaded bikes all day, it might even be justified.

We biked into (town), first on ATV trails and class 4 roads, then on a long, lovely dirt descent.

We stopped at the Chicken Wiggle Farm Stand, an establishment suspiciously bereft of both chickens and wiggles. However, the apples were massive, fresh, crisp, and delicious, and the miscellaneous snack collection was more than adequate. We added a pear-apple cider to our bag of holding, and soldiered up the first of many giant climbs of the day.

This hill started insanely steep, up a heavily forested cliffside, and gradually leveled out into farmland (that was still surprisingly steep). The journey continued uphill higher and higher.

For entertainment, we speculated about the nature of our upcoming Interstate 89 crossing: would it be a bridge? A tunnel? Perhaps a jump or a ferry? Or maybe more of a frogger situation? The speculation continued as we crested the hill and made our way into a nearby valley.

We briefly took a paved road to our first uphill class 4 of the day, but were met with a surprise: a highly informal "road closed" sign. As bicycle tourists, we assumed an implicit "to things other than ATBS, which naturally are capable of riding across ALL TERRAIN", kept calm, and carried on. We proceeded past a couple of houses, along a trail that only barely met the criteria for "rural driveway", and crossed a babbling brook via a shaky old bridge whose construction quality would have disgruntled even the most lackadaisical of highwaymen trolls. The road soon shot upwards a solid 15-20% grade, or maybe more when you accounted for the fact that about half of the road was missing due to runoff damage (presumably from the july 2023, december 2023, july 2024, or august 2024 flooding -- yes, we've had a rough relationship with water for the last couple of years). We half-rode, half-walked our bikes up the path, clipping a decent pace in case one of the nearby landowners took issue with our passing and tried to follow us up the road to tell us off. Fortunately, within a quarter mile or so, the runoff damage stopped, leaving us to content only with the average baby head rocks, treefall, potholes, and caterpillars one tends to find on your average class 4 road.

Once the runoff damage stopped, the road turned surprisingly rideable. Before we knew it, we found ourselves on a dirt road, queried for directions by a very confused CRV who took us for locals. The road continued a smidge uphill, past some slurry containers, through additional farms, beside an apple orchard, and -- much to the dismay of our betting arrangement -- across BOTH a bridge AND a tunnel to cross I-89. Even more surprisingly, the road crossing I-89 was dirt. Classic Vermont, defying even the most oddball infrastructure bet.

After our exciting crossing, we zoomed downhill on more finely packed dirt roads into the village of Braintree, which -- like many of the towns we passed through in day 1 and 2 -- had basically nothing going on.

So we headed up a hefty hill to our linner and drink destination for the day: bent hill brewery. This was probably the most brutal hill climb of our entire trip, featuring a relentless grade, a surprising amount of sun, sweltering heat, awfully large trucks, and empty stomachs. In the end, we made it to Bent Hill, an establishment of much renown, and enjoyed a hearty dinner of yellow curry, gnocchi, mushroom tacos, and several delicious beers.

The outdoor and indoor spaces were cute and well maintained, the bartender was friendly and curious about our trip, and the beer was of the highest quality. We left with completely full stomachs and hearts.

Unfortunately, our ride to our second primitive camping site wasn't the easiest. We backtracked up yet another very steep hill, then took a not-particularly-relaxing descent along dirt roads and class 4 roads.

I especially enjoyed our journey down a class 4 road that essentially no longer existed; the original road was clearly now a drainage ditch for runoff from the nearby forest (directly onto a dirt road that has obviously recently undergone a complete drainage renovation to deal with that runoff). Instead of riding on the road-turned-drainage ditch, we followed a (vaguely MTB blue) trail that followed the vague path of the original road across giant roots and rock gardens. Eventually, the trail returned us to the road, once things leveled off. We proceeded through a car, truck, and bus graveyard in the woods, past an actual graveyard, to finally empty us out onto an intersection with a main, paved road. At that point, I turned around to discover that the road we had just traveled down was very much marked Private, and that intruders were instructed to Beware of Dog. I humbly request that the owners post their warnings on both sides of their property if they wish intruders to respect their wishes.

From there, we endured a brief uphill climb into Roxbury State Forest, where we quickly and easily found a wild camping site that might have even been legal. We set up camp, enjoyed a simple snack, hung up the bear bag, and enjoyed a much quieter night of sleep.

Curious about the rest of the story? You can now find it in part 3.