Oh, the irony. On the same day that the Washington Post called Vermont’s four-mile-long Colchester Causeway “one of the country’s most spectacular bike trails,” a May storm devastated this thin spit of land that dissects the waters of Lake Champlain, rendering it impassable… and throwing a wrench into plans for an upcoming bicycle tour through Vermont.
“The damage is bad,” Jenna said. “The Causeway isn’t supposed to open at all this summer.”
“It’s got to reopen,” I said. “There’s too much tourism at stake.”
The situation looked somewhat dire, with officials estimating a half-million dollars in damage to the Causeway and projecting months of necessary repairs. But all hope wasn’t lost: There were two months before our multi-day bike trip, which we had timed to coincide with Jenna’s birthday in early July. And I was going to bike the Colchester Causeway by force of will, if I had to.
Day 1: 55 miles from Hinesberg to Smugglers Notch State Park.
On July 4, while many Americans gathered around barbecues, lit up sparklers, and injured themselves in fireworks accidents, we drove to our friends’ home in Hinesberg, Vermont, to embark on a three-day, 180-mile tour through the Green Mountains and along Lake Champlain—full of beautiful roads, high mountain passes, quaint country marts, and the best creemees in the world (also, the only creemees in the world).
Each of our bikes was loaded with about 30 lbs of gear: spare clothes, sleeping bags, several liters of water, food, a tent, a stove, fuel.
The ride began with the hardest bicycling of the entire trip: pedaling up and over the Appalachian Gap (elevation 2,375 ft), a several-miles-long mountain pass with a steady steepness of 15 percent. It’s so steep, in fact, that the ski resort Mad River Glen runs parallel to the road. We were essentially bicycling up and down a black diamond ski trail.
In the below photo, I’m pointing at Jenna in the far distance as she creeps her way up App Gap…
From App Gap, it was a breezy downhill to Waitsfield, where we refilled our water bottles at Stark Mountain Bike Works and took shade on their porch from the intense heat that was building up. It was turning into a scorcher: 90 degrees F, with a heat index above 100.
We then biked another 15 miles to Waterbury Center, where we all but collapsed inside a bookstore cafe from the heat. In the air conditioning, we took power naps while seated at their table and on their couch.
From here, it was another 15 miles over the tourism-congested roads of Waterbury Center to Stowe, then up the looooong mountain road to Smuggler’s Notch State Park, where we camped after a cooling plunge in the nearby watering hole of Bingham Falls.
— Stephenergy (@KurczyBeast) July 9, 2018
It took me about 10 minutes to build up the nerve to make the above leap into Bingham Falls, in part because I needed a running start to clear several boulders. I would have backed down from the 40-foot-jump, but I felt peer-pressured by a teenage girl who climbed up two times and jumped twice in the time that I was waffling on the edge of the rocks.
Day 2: 75 miles from Smuggler’s Notch to North Hero Island.
For the second day in a row, our route was front-loaded with a big uphill. This morning, we were pedaling up Smuggler’s Notch (elevation 2,170 ft) in the shadow of Mount Mansfield (which we’d hiked up a few months earlier in knee-deep snow). It was a series of steep, narrow switchbacks along a single-lane road.
From the Top of the Notch Boulder, it was a nearly pedal-free 10-mile downhill to Jeffersonville, with sections where we coasted at 40 miles per hour.
We stopped for coffee in Jeffersonville and continued north up Route 108…
…and stopped for lunch in Bakersfield at the Village Deli, which served the biggest, cheapest creemees and hoagies that I’ve ever encountered. Our foot-long-sandwich was easily 18 inches long, and our creemee was so huge that it was served in a small bucket.
As we were eating on the Village Deli’s front porch, a local resident saw me holding Jenna’s smartphone as I tried in vain to pick up a cellphone signal.
“You’re in Bakersfield,” he said proudly. “This is a cellphone dead zone.” In other words, Your fancy city-slicker gadgets won’t work out here in the real world.
We still had a lot of bicycling: 20 miles to St. Albans Town, then another 15 miles to the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge (about 5 miles south of the Canadian border), and another 15 miles south to North Hero Island, where we could stay with our Hinesberg friends’ parents. (We would also be on the lookout for sightings of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who recently purchased a $600,000 summer home there.)
En route, we passed the birthplace of the 21st US president, Chester A. Arthur, whose father had been a schoolteacher in this area of rural Vermont in the 1820s. We also refueled at our second creemee-stop of the day.
As we reached our destination, Jenna wiped out in the middle of the road. For a birthday gift, I’d given her clip-in pedals and clip-in shoes—which seemed like a nice gift, but was perhaps somewhat sabotaging because she’d never before bicycled with clip-ins. As she pulled to a sudden stop, she was unable to speedily unclip, falling sideways and bloodying her knee. Happy birthday, Jenna!
Day 3: 45 miles from North Hero to Hinesberg.
Now came the day of truth. Would we be able to cross the Colchester Causeway?
We were in luck. Just days earlier, the governor of Vermont had held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to reopen the bike trail after a two-month closure for $230,000 in repairs.
The Causeway met expectations: The 4-mile-long, 10-foot-wide, gravel path through the middle of Lake Champlain was serene and somewhat surreal—this kind of thing just doesn’t exist anywhere else (to my knowledge). Vermont’s Green Mountains were on our left, New York’s Adirondacks were on our right, and water was all around.
It was a busy Saturday on the trail. At the center of the Causeway is a 200-foot-wide water channel that requires a 10-minute ferry crossing. We waited in line for about an hour to get a $5 seat on the ferry.
From there, it was it another 25 miles south through Burlington and then back east to Hinesberg… propelled by one final gigantic creemee.
