Bicycle and Pedestrian Travel
Great Bicycling in the Kingdom
Excluding Freeways and Arterial Highways, the Northeast Kingdom has just under 2300 miles of ideal biking roads. 1,501 of the roads in the Kingdom are unpaved; some may even give mountain bikers a challenge.
Mountain bikers should visit Kingdom Trails -- 100 miles of moderate to difficult mountain bike trails in Burke, Vermont , recently voted the ". . .best mountain-bike terrain east of the Mississippi." by National Geographic Adventure Magazine. Several alpine ski areas have also made their lifts available to cyclers during the Summer and fall including both Burke Mountain and Jay Peak Resort.
The Vermont Association of Snow Travelers or VAST trail system, a web of trails and logging roads covering all of Vermont, is another source of potential bicycling trails. Please remember to always check with landowners before traveling along any trail. Kingdom Trails relies heavily on the VAST system.
Virtually anywhere you go in the Northeast Kingdom is great biking territory. Heavy traffic is usually restricted to class 1 town highways, interstates, and state highways, leaving Vermont's quiet, local roads for bicycle explorers and pleasure drivers alike.
Cycling in the Kingdom
The Northeastern Vermont Development Association provides a detailed guide to bicycling in the Northeast Kingdom. It is in Adobe Acrobat which requires a special reader or plugin.
Click here to Download Cycling in the Kingdom (1.7 MB)
Click here to Download Adobe Acrobat Reader
Cycling in the Kingdom may take a while to download on older computers, but do be patient. it's worth it! After you download it, you can save it to your hard disk to view later or print out a specific route. It was written by experienced cyclists), and lists several Loops through the Kingdom, as well as North-South and East-West links between the loops.
Backroad Bicycle Plan
This guide for dirt road bike routes was completed for NVDA by the same authors of Cycling in the Kingdom in 2004. The routes are still great and this popular guide has all sorts of tips for those interested in seeing the backroads of the Northeast Kingdom. As above, unless you already have Adobe Acrobat installed, you will need to install it to view the Backroad Bicycle Plan.Click here to Download the Backroad Bicycle Plan
To download the entire document, click on the link above. We strongly recommend that you copy this document to your hard drive before trying to scroll through as it is somewhat lengthy and heavily laden with pictures. You can also view individual sample pages here by following the links below.
* Note on PDF documents. If you are experiencing difficulty downloading these or other PDF documents try saving them to your hard drive and then open them from your hard drive rather than trying to view them on the web.