Page 111 - (DK Eyewitness) Top 10 Travel Guide - New England

Vermont ❮❮ 109

A DAY IN ROBERT FROST COUNTRY
Steam
Homer Mill Skylight Pond
Noble Road Skyline Lodge
125 Farm
Battell
Mountain 100
Robert
Frost Long Trail
Wayside
Robert Frost W hite
Interpretive 125
Trail Gr een Mountain
National F or est
100
Rochester Café
MORNING
Robert Frost (1874–1963), the
seminal poet of the New England
Traditional houses, Woodstock countryside, spent 39 summers
in the Green Mountain National
Woodstock and Quechee
9 Forest (see pp26–7). This easy-to-
moderate day of hiking captures
MAP K5
It’s little wonder that Woodstock the poet and the landscape he
is such a popular destination for loved. Start with pancakes and
maple syrup at the Rochester
weddings. With its broad town green, Café (Rte 100, Rochester; 802 767
meticulously restored Federal and 4302), at the same soda fountain
Victorian houses, covered bridge in where Frost used to eat, and have
the middle of town, and five churches the café pack you a lunch. Drive
boasting Paul Revere bells, it is the west on Rte 125 to the Robert
very picture of old-time Vermont. Frost Interpretive Trail, where
Even the Billings Farm (see p38) you can read some of Frost’s
serves as a museum of Vermont pithy verse and learn to identify
native plants. Just east of the
rural life. Head east on Route 4 to see almost adjacent Robert Frost
the vertigo-inspiring 165-ft (50-m) Wayside picnic area, a 5-minute
deep gorge carved by the walk on an unmarked dirt road
Ottauquechee River. will bring you to Frost’s cabin at
the Homer Noble Farm, main-
St. Johnsbury
0 tained as he left it.
MAP L3 • Athenaeum Gallery:
1171 Main St; 802 748 8291; open AFTERNOON
10am–5:30pm Mon, Wed & Fri, When the muse evaded Frost, he
2–7pm Tue & Thu, 10am–3pm Sat; sought solace in the woods. For
www.stjathenaeum.org a hike, drive east on Rte 125 a
“St. J,” as Vermonters call it, is both short distance and turn left onto
the hub of the state’s Northeast Steam Mill Road. A bit further on,
park at the Skylight Pond trail-
Kingdom and the gateway between head. The path ascends the flank
Vermont’s Green Mountains and of Battell Mountain, crisscrossing
New Hampshire’s White Mountains. the hillside through a forest of
When Thaddeus Fairbanks invented white birch, red oak, and hem-
the platform scale in 1830, the town locks. Overgrown and tumbledown
became his manufacturing center. stone walls proclaim old boundary
The Fairbanks clan left its stamp lines, as forest reclaims farmland.
The moderate 45-minute climb
on St. Johnsbury, donating both the ends on a ridge connecting to the
Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium legendary Long Trail. Turn left for
(see p110), and the Athenaeum, a a short hike to Skyline Lodge, a
library and gallery with magnifi cent rustic shelter for hikers.
landscape paintings.
See map on p106
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