Over the river and through the woods, Vermont’s rail trail reopens after the floods

A year after epic summer flooding delayed the official opening of New England’s longest rail trail, the 93-mile route across northern Vermont is finally delivering on the promise made years ago of a cross-state recreation trail.

The Lamoille Valley Rail Trail is open to cyclists, hikers, horseback riders, and other non-motorized uses between Swanton, in northwestern Vermont near Lake Champlain, and St. Johnsbury, not far from the Connecticut River border with New Hampshire. In the winter, the trail is open to snowmobiles as well as skiers and snowshoers.

One section of flood-damaged trail from 2023 flood remains to be repaired, but there is a posted detour. Heavy rains earlier this month also closed some sections, but most of the trail weathered the storm. Updates are at https://railtrails.vermont.gov/trail-updates/.

The trail goes through 18 communities and includes the Fisher Covered Bridge, which had been the last working covered railroad bridge in the country, in Wolcott.

“I have ridden rail trails in 48 of the 50 states. And this is right up in the top with some of the most amazing ones,” said Marianne Borowski, founder of the Cross New Hampshire Adventure Trail. She’s part of a group trying to extend the Vermont trail 35 miles to the state line, where it would connect to trails in the Granite State.

“It drips with New England charm,” Ms. Borowski said. “It’s just so Vermont, it’s so beautiful. It’s got forests and fields and farms and rivers and streams and wetlands and, you know, rail cuts and cows – I mean it’s just got everything.”

The Lamoille Valley trail is one of a number of rail trails in the state. Near its western end, it intersects with the Missisiquoi Valley Rail Trail, which runs 26 miles between St. Albans and Richford, near the Canadian border.

Drawing visitors to Vermont towns

Adria Halstead-Johnson and her husband, Charles, of Marshfield, were riding the trail east from Hardwick one day in June.

“It gives me a safe place to bike. I love seeing everything that’s around it,” said Mrs. Halstead-Johnson. “We’re leisure riders, you know, we’re not the kind of riders that have to go a certain speed or make certain miles. We like to get out. We like to see Vermont.”

Communities along the route are welcoming trail users. In Johnson, the Lamoille Valley Bike Tours company is renting bikes, arranging tours, and offering a shuttle service to help people make one-way trips without having to pedal back.

Most of the 40 or so bikes that the business rents out are electric, which makes it possible for more people to use the trail.

“The bulk of the summer season, until school starts and then again in the fall, every bike goes out every day,” said the company’s Jim Roy, whose niece and nephew own the business, which began operation in 2016 when the first sections of trail opened. “I mean, it’s just booming.”

In Wolcott, about 15 miles east of Johnson, there are plans to offer amenities like restrooms and a coffee shop for trail users and others, and to provide additional miles of trails in a new town forest that can be used by mountain bikers and others.

From railroad to recreation

The trail runs on a rail line that was completed in 1877 and operated until the 1980s. In the late 1990s, the state asked for proposals about what should be done with the line.

The Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, a statewide snowmobile organization, began work in the early 2000s transforming the line into a four-season recreation trail. It turned over the trail’s management and construction to the Vermont Agency of Transportation in 2022. The group said it still hoped to help out.

“The Lamoille Valley Rail Trail for us is a child that we’ve raised and we’re sending off to college, and so we’re not just letting that kid go,” the snowmobile club’s executive director, Cindy Locke, told a committee of the Vermont Legislature at the time.

The state transportation agency says total costs, both public and private, to complete the transition of the old, unused rail line into today’s four-season trail was just over $31 million, or almost $336,000 per mile.

A cancelled inauguration

The Lamoille Valley trail was actually finished in the spring of 2023, and Gov. Phil Scott was set to inaugurate it last July. But a few days before Mr. Scott, an avid cyclist, was set to ride the trail from end to end, the floods destroyed a number of bridges and washed away years of work.

The last unfinished section is a stretch just south of Greensboro Bend, about 25 miles from the eastern end of the trail. It’s due to be finished later this year, state officials say.

The governor is hoping to reschedule his ride of the entire trail for later this year, said his spokeswoman Rebecca Kelley.

Meanwhile, at what had been the train station in Hardwick, Adam Anghilante, of Underhill, was taking a break recently from a 30-mile ride.

“I’ve always been a huge cyclist and I’m at the age now where mountain biking is a little too intense for me,” he said. “But being able to ride on this beautiful rail trail between the farms and the towns and the views of the mountains and the rivers, it’s spectacular.”

This story was reported by The Associated Press. Wilson Ring, of Stowe, Vermont, retired from the AP in 2023 after nearly 31 years with the news organization.