Bikepacking Vermontshire: Part 5

October 01, 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.

On the fifth day of our journey, it rained.

Want to know how much? Go take a shower. Step out of it, but instead of drying yourself off, grab a fan, and plug it in pointing at yourself while you stand in front of your open refrigerator. Oh, and smear yourself with mud in every crevice to really simulate that gritty feel.

To get an idea of what biking in that is like, wear a raincoat and whatever other rain gear you own in the shower. Bring your bicycle in there as well, but don't forget to smear every part of it with mud, including the chain, handlebars, and derailleur. Then set your bicycle up with a trainer in your house in front of the open refrigerator with the fan going, and have someone slowly pour a bucket of ice cold water on you every 30 seconds.

Repeat that for 5 hours and you have our morning. Except you're missing the part where you need to navigate over rock gardens, through massive puddles, get slapped with brambles that are trying their darndest to overgrow the trail, and there's a little voice in your head worrying more and more that last year's floods might have permanently destroyed a part of the trail you're on (and nobody has bothered to report the state of it in the past year because nobody has even tried to ride this trail).

So it was kind of OK. It was sort of like the scene in the Chernobyl miniseries where a stubborn engineer measures 3.6 Roentgen of radiation leakage from the failing plant and claims "Not great, not terrible." Parts of the day sucked, but in retrospect, we made some pretty great memories. We ate some delicious burritos. We drank some tasty beers and tasty coffee. We managed to wake up dry and go to bed dry. We ate even more delicious grilled burritos. We even had a nice fire before bed!

... but that's getting ahead of ourselves. Back to the beginning.

Plop ploop plink plonk.

PLOP POP BLOOP blonk blink.

Bloppity bloopity poppity broopity plonk plink.

So sang the soaking wet tent rainfly as we lay under torrential rains, dreading stepping out of the tent and packing everything up wet. But eventually we gathered our courage, packed up camp, helped our elderly campsite neighbors hitch their (surprisingly light) teardrop camper to their car, wrapped ourselves in water-resistant layers, and got on the road.

Fortunately, our morning was almost entirely car-free. Unfortunately, this was one of our more rugged mornings: a ride up singletrack trails, through an abandoned farming community, and onto much-neglected class 4 roads to loop around the northern edge of Waterbury Reservoir and some particularly steep, landslide-prone terrain around Cotton Brook.

It turned out to be a fair amount of fun. A little cold and a little nervewracking. But hey, that's better than riding on the side of an interstate, which would be cold, nervewracking, and infinitely more dangerous.

So we pushed our way up through the winding singletrack, with only the squeaking of our brakes, the constant torrent of rainfall, and occasional splish-splashes of leaf-topped puddles as our soundtrack. We walked the bikes over a surprising amount of wooden bridges. And before long, we found ourselves at Ricker Farm, the transition from singletrack mountain bike trails to abandoned old road. An old laminated paper sign indicated that some trail was inaccessible, but we were pretty sure we remembered the same sign from last time. So we sped on, squeaking our mechanical brakes through the foggy, sopping wet forest. If you don't know what wet, squeaky, worn-over-days-of-class-4-road-and-not-totally-clean disc brakes sound like, let me describe it to you: it kind of sounds like you chained several mute clowns to your bicycle and you're dragging them along through the forest, and the only way they have to communicate their terror is through one of those classic squeaky clown noses.

So basically everything was going really well. We cruised (mostly up) the rolling hills until we reached the fabled 'turning point' where the road finally crosses Cotton Brook. As our wheels gradually turned north, then northeast, we held our breath, doubts clouding our minds:

• was that sign actually referring to this trail?
• are we going to have to turn around, wasting several more hours of cold wet riding to get right back to where we started today in Little River State Park -- before riding busier, unpleasant roads up to Stowe?
• are we idiots for following this road based off the 'passable' reports of a few internet randoms who claim to have ridden gravel bikes around the reservoir successfully?

Then we reached a giant hole where the Cotton Brook bridge used to be.

My dream was collapsing. The worst had surely come true: we'd just have to turn around, waste hours more of our time, and start again in Little River. My cold toes would remain this cold for hours more, and wind up subjected to the debris of paved roads to boot, before they could warm up in Stowe.

I was just about ready to give up and lie down on the ground in the forest. Even if Cotton Brook was a multiple foot deep whitewater rapid between twenty-foot walls of solid wet rock with no hope of getting a bike through it, I might have tried. The situation was dire.

But then I walked past the caution fencing, and poked my head up over the piles of dirt on the side of the hole-where-a-bridge-used-to-be.

And I saw a path, winding steeply down to the (not a whitewater rapid) Cotton Brook, and back up the other side. The dirt looked a bit loose, but no worse than what we're used to riding on class 4 roads. Maybe better, since some large equipment had clearly packed it down in the last few months.

So we took our bikes over the dirt hills, down the slope, through the brook (I provided Meg with a piggyback ride through the brook, since I wear sandals on these trips but she wears shoes), and up the opposite slope.

And then we rode our bikes (mostly downhill) to the town of Moscow, and along a dirt road right onto the bike paths of Stowe.

It was no more than an hour between our stream crossing and sitting down at the bar at Ranch Camp for a Crunch Wrap, some fried artichokes, and an A.M. Bowl. We warmed our cold feets and filled our empty bellies while chatting with a very friendly bartender, who recently returned to Stowe from Denver; Sarah, we wish you the best of luck!

We finished our lunch, and headed over to Stowe Cider for an obligatory cider flight. We both took the opportunity to dry ourselves off and change into some dryer clothes. And since Stowe Cider cranks the AC pretty strong, we then headed over to the nearby Woodland Baking and Coffee for some warm beverages and a slice of banana sesame bread.

Our spirits restored and our bellies full, we returned to Ranch Camp for a to-go burrito (for later grilling -- more on that later), and wound up chatting with one of the co-owners, Ryan, about our bikepacking adventures. He even took our picture and posted it to the Ranch Camp socials for some cred with the bikepacking community.

We took a quick stop at the beer shop in town for a to-go mixed four pack, and headed to our next campsite at Elmore State Park. Our route had a decent amount of climbing, but once we got off of VT 100, there was next to no traffic, dirt roads in surprisingly not-muddy conditions, and some gloriously spooky views of cows in the fog. Despite missing our first intended turn onto Elmore Mountain Road, our detour ended up being equally scenic and equally pleasant.

After a couple of hours of riding, we arrived at the park. The attendant, Bobby, was there and visibly excited about hosting bikepackers. As we headed to our reserved campsite, he mentioned that we might want to upgrade to a lean-to for the night. Stubborn idiots as we are, we said we were fine and moved along.

Then I tried to start a fire.

What felt like an hour of attempted firestarting later (who knows, maybe it was five minutes?), I looked at the forecast for that night and the next day.

Then I returned to the welcome center, upgraded us to a lean-to, and purchased a firestarter.

We picked up our fully-assembled (freestanding, fortunately) tent, carried it over to the lean-to, and I carted our supply of wood, branches, and twigs over to the lean-to in Meg's panniers, which fortunately feature dry-bags that can be removed (and, as it turns out, the dry bag holsters can fit about four pieces of split firewood each).

I re-assembled the fire, popped the firestarter in, and had a blaze raging in our fire ring within a minute.

We cracked some beers, grilled our burritos (note: if you try this, move your burritos to real aluminum foil -- not waxpaper-aluminum wrap liners -- before grilling; peeling the melted waxpaper off is not particularly fun), and soon retired to the lean-to. I set my head down on my pillow.

Plop ploop plink plonk.

PLOP POP BLOOP blonk blink.

Bloppity bloopity poppity broopity plonk plink.

So sang the roof of our lean-to as we lay under torrential rains, no longer dreading stepping out of the tent and packing everything up wet. Thanks for letting us upgrade, Bobby.

Curious about the rest of the story? You can now find it in part 6.