🍂 Vermont

About Vermont

🏛 Vermont Fall Foliage

Vermont is America's most perfectly realized New England state — a mosaic of dairy farms, white-steepled village churches, covered bridges, maple sugar orchards, and rolling Green Mountain ridgelines that defines the aesthetic most people carry in their minds when they think of this region. It is the least populous state east of the Mississippi (population 650,000), which means that its countryside genuinely retains the unspoiled quality that New England has spent decades trading on.

Fall foliage in Vermont is the finest in the United States — a claim that New Hampshire and Maine would dispute, but the combination of the Green Mountains' elevation, the state's agricultural landscape, and the mix of sugar maple, birch, and beech that dominates the forest creates a color display that has no peer east of the Rockies. The peak typically occurs in mid-October in the north and late October in the south; the Route 100 corridor through the Mad River Valley and the Northeast Kingdom (the state's wild northeastern corner) offer the most spectacular views. Lodging books out a year ahead for peak foliage weekends — plan ahead or visit the week before peak for smaller crowds.

Stowe is Vermont's most famous resort town — a picture-perfect village beneath Mount Mansfield (4,393 feet, the state's highest peak), with a ski mountain that regularly ranks among the Northeast's top five and a four-season outdoor lifestyle that anchors a sophisticated food, spa, and boutique shopping scene. The Stowe Recreation Path winds 5.3 miles along the West Branch River through the village and surrounding landscape. Ben & Jerry's ice cream factory in nearby Waterbury offers tours and the flavour graveyard — an outdoor cemetery for discontinued flavours — that is simultaneously kitschy and genuinely entertaining.

Burlington, Vermont's largest city (pop. 45,000), sits on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain with views across to the Adirondacks in New York. Church Street Marketplace is a pedestrian shopping and dining strip that is one of New England's most vibrant main streets. The farmers market, the craft beer culture (Vermont has more craft breweries per capita than any other US state), and the waterfront park make Burlington one of America's finest small cities. Vermont's artisan food economy — cheese (Cabot, Jasper Hill), maple syrup, apple cider, and smoked meats — makes it one of the best farm-stand and country store touring destinations in the country.

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