Green Mountains Part 4

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After spending the day in Barre learning all about granite, we were ready to get back to some hiking. The town of Bristol is just about 6 miles north of our campground. One of the hikes that starts right in downtown is called Bristol Ledges. Actually the hiking trail starts at the dead end of Mountain Terrace road, but there is no parking allowed anywhere near the trailhead and all the information we read about this trail makes that point crystal clear. So we park near the town square where there was plenty of parking. It wasn’t perfectly clear which surface streets we needed to take to get to the actual trailhead but after a half mile or so, we find the trail. Yes, there are numerous no parking signs all along the streets and homes near the trail. If I owned a home near the trail, I might be tempted to come up with a means to make some extra money and rent our parking spots for hikers in my driveway.

Red Spotted Newt

Don't Park at Trailhead

AllTrails lists this hike as a 1.9 mile out and back with about 850 feet of elevation gain. But there are other trail options and we have several geocaches to find by taking a slightly longer route. The trail starts out as a gated service road that is fairly steep with an average grade of 8%. There is one spot along the way where we get a pretty decent view to the south. Our campground is somewhere out there.

View to the South on Way Up

Snake

By the time we get to the 1.75 mile point we have connected back up with the main trail and now have the final push up the steep rocky hiking trail. It’s still another mile of about 10% grade which is slow going simply because of how many rocks we have to negotiate. We do have a few more geocaches to give us a break on the climb.

A Rocky Trail

Rock Pile

As we get near the Ledges, we come upon large outcropping of rocks. It is still steep but at least the footing is a bit better than the trail with scattered rocks all over it. We stop for a quick break at the ledge which has a great view of town and beyond to the west. It is likely that many of the larger mountains in the distant haze are actually the Adirondacks in New York State.

Nearing the Viewpoint

Quite the View

There are several groups of people sitting on the exposed rocks enjoying the views. We had one geocache that was just a couple hundred feet away but we felt we might draw attention to it by looking around in the woods nearby. Since there was yet another cache more than a third mile beyond the ledges, we decided to go for it first and hope the crowds would be gone when we came back. The plan worked out pretty well. It is a relatively flat trail but not frequently used based on the overgrown nature of it. Finding the cache took us some time. It hadn’t been logged in 18 months, but it was still there. We turn around and come back to the ledges to eat our lunch Chris had lugged up the hill. We found the area was free of other people so that last cache was found without anybody wondering what we were up to. We had lunch, enjoyed the view and started down the trail.

Another View

Exposed Rock

We timed that quite well since there was a group of 16 or so noisy kids coming up just as we left. We took the more direct route back down and walked past the town’s water tower. We made it back to the trailhead with 5.1 miles so far.

Wood Frog Blends In

Small Pond

We weren’t quite done exploring as we attempted to walk about a mile to something called Bristol Rock just east of town. When we ran out of sidewalks and saw how narrow the shoulder was and how fast the traffic was moving, we decided to try that stop for a later time. Bristol is a cute little town and we found our car just where we had left it 6.3 miles earlier. Funny how the AllTrails 1.9 mile hike became more than 3 times longer with all our detours along the way. It was a fun but tiring hike.

Holley Hall in Downtown Bristol

Fountain in Bristol Town Green

The next day we shoot for what we hope will be an easier hike. Buck Mountain is just a little south of Vergennes so it is a relatively close trail. The hike is about 3 miles out and back with just under 600 feet of elevation gain. So this one should be considerably easier than yesterday’s hike to Bristol Ledges. There are also 9 geocaches hidden along the trail so we will have extra reasons for the hike. There are many signs at the trailhead stating that the trail borders private property and hikers need to stay on the main trail to the summit. The first few hundred feet are rather muddy but once we get past this low area, the trail becomes pleasant albeit uphill.

Turtle Guards the Trail

We end up not having great luck with finding most of the caches. Some we simply cannot find while others are located well beyond posted signs with a 2024 date on them so we know they are recent additions. Since most of these were hidden 10 years ago, I suspect that the current landowners are wanting to keep strangers from wandering their property beyond the main trail. About 1.75 miles up the trail is a side trail that clearly leads to a small pond. There are no POSTED signs along this one so we go take a look. We can get to the western edge of the pond but there doesn’t appear to be any trails that lead around the water to get us much closer.

Pond View

At the 2.9 mile point we hit the main bluff where we have tremendous views of the valley below. Being on the west side of the Buck Mountain, we can see glimpse of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks further west. We decide this would make for a great lunch spot and sit down to enjoy the scenery.

View from Buck Mountain

Chris Soaks in the View

Lunch Spot

Lake Champlain and Adirondacks

There were several turkey vultures soaring in the currents around the summit and I got a couple of decent pictures as they flew past our lunch spot.

Turkey Vulture

After eating we decided to see if we could actually make it to the true peak of the mountain. We spotted a much fainter trail beyond our lunch spot and hoped this would get us to the peak which I have marked on my Garmin GPSr. It didn’t take long before the trail completely petered out and we were in thick brush. We may have been able to make our way to the real summit but it was obvious that there would be no view whatsoever. We opt to turn back and start the journey back down to the car. This was a fun hike with a view worth the effort. The only thing that would have made it better is if we had better luck finding the geocaches. Our tally: 2 finds, 3 did not finds, and 4 did not attempt - not our finest day.

Bluebell

Another Overlook View

After two days of hiking, we took a day off to rest up before heading out for a bike ride. The Delaware and Hudson Railway previously ran from Montreal south through western Vermont and eastern New York into Pennsylvania. Today, much of the former railway property has been sold off to private parties but there is about 20 miles of the old railroad in Vermont that has been turned into a rail trail. The problem is that there are two different 10 mile sections with more than a 12 mile gap where the old railroad crossed into New York. We decide that the northern section from Castleton to just south of Poultney Vermont was likely a long enough ride and it would be closer to camp than the section further to the south.

It’s about a 40 mile drive from camp to the trailhead in Castleton. There were several other cars parked here and we got the last valid spot to start our ride to the south. The Vermont State University Castleton campus is at the very beginning of the trail. We take a little time to bike through some of the campus to see what it’s like.

Passing Through the Campus

Football Field

Neat Eyebrow Window Design

The trail itself is in great shape with a gravel surface that is quite easy to bike on. I think even my old road bike would have done just fine. We have biked many rail trails all over the country. Most of them have some sort of barrier or gate at road intersections to keep vehicles from entering. The ones along this trail were by far the best design I have seen. The open section on one side to allow pedestrians and bicycles through but keep ATVs out has a flared out section up top to accommodate the handlebars of a bicycle.

Nice Rail Trail

My Favorite Gate Design

Along the way, we had numerous geocaches to look for. We didn’t bother to stop at all of them but we would find 8. The town of Poultney is about 7.5 miles from our starting point. There was a nice bench to sit and enjoy our lunch before continuing south.

Old Train Station in Poultney

We don’t have much further beyond town before we run out of obvious trail at the Vermont/New York state line. There was a large quarry just to the east that wasn’t operating on a Saturday but looks to be one that is still open based on the looks of the equipment. This quarry is much different looking than the one we saw in Barre but a sign explained that we were looking at a slate quarry not granite. We had seen other large rock debris piles earlier in our ride but didn’t know what they were. Now we know this part of Vermont was known as for its slate production - mostly roofing slate. I suppose the trail technically continued but it was a narrow single track with very tall weeds growing on both sides. We opt to skip going any further to the south.

Slate Quarry

At the State Line

New York's Side

We enjoyed the ride back and even biked thru some of the streets of Poultney. We probably wouldn’t have even noticed that many of the sidewalks in town are not made of concrete but are large slabs of slate. I guess that makes sense since there is a slate quarry just down the road. As we were passing by one farmer’s property, he was just moving his cattle from one pen to another. We stopped to watch them to see if he was going to move them across the bike path to his other field but it didn’t look like that was going to happen. We made it back to the car with almost 20 miles of nice bike riding in the Vermont countryside.

Old Barn

Small Pond Along Trail

Cattle on the Move

We have been enjoying our stay at Green Mountain Family Campground. There have been a couple of hot days when it would have been nice to hop in the pool, but it wasn't open yet and based on the look of things it may not open until the Fourth of July and we will be gone by then. We haven't seen a lot of wildlife by our rig but we did see a fox trotting across the campground field as we drove out one morning. Another night just before sunset, Chris had walked our trash down to the dumpster. From time to time the dumpster was being locked up at night because of bear activity. About 5 minutes after returning the campground owner texted us a picture from the dumpster she was just at. I suspect the bear had been watching Chris because one of the items in our trash that night was the skin from our grilled salmon. Had she known she could have just fed the bear by hand!

Fox Out for Morning Stroll

Bear Wants Our Salmon