Unexpected Experiences
For many, travel is about more than circling a spot on the map; it’s about seeing a place in a new way. In Vermont, the soaring feeling of being atop a majestic peak, the wonder of star-studded nights, and the taste of field-foraged food can take you to a whole new state. This guide is your starting point to discover experiences as diverse as Green Mountain landscapes.
Outdoors
Lamoille Valley Rail Trail
The 95-mile LVRT, the longest rail trail in New England, crosses northern Vermont between St. Johnsbury and Swanton. The all-season trail is mostly flat with a crushed stone surface, and is suitable for an array of pursuits, such as bicycling, horseback riding, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, and dogsledding. The trail stitches together 18 communities and travels along some of Vermont’s most rural landscapes. Lamoille Valley Bike Tours offers rentals (including e-bikes) and an end-to-end shuttle service with advance reservations.
Scenic River Tour
Ready to ride the river? Great River Outfitters rents tubes, kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards for your Connecticut River adventure. The tour starts with a shuttle ride to Sumner Falls in Hartland, where you’ll begin your journey. You’ll paddle or float the calm Connecticut River until you reach the Path of Life Sculpture Garden, where the Great River Outfitters team will help you back onto the riverbank.
Guided Fishing
Vermont is home to 92 species of freshwater fish. Visit the Woodstock Inn & Resort for their Orvis-Endorsed Fly Fishing Program, offering lessons and guided trips from late March through October, or travel to Manchester to shop at the Orvis flagship store, fish on the Battenkill River, and view the 40,000 artifacts at the nearby American Museum of Fly Fishing. Gibbs Guides of Island Pond books fishing trips in the Northeast Kingdom. Stay Bent Fishing Tours in Bethel runs winter and summer trips around Vermont. In the Champlain Islands, Captain Dave with Last Cast Bass offers bass, northern pike, and lake trout charters.
Equine Encounter
See Vermont from the saddle at Pond Hill Ranch in Castleton, where trail rides for all levels are available seven days a week by appointment. The ranch also hosts professional rodeos throughout the summer, complete with roping, bull riding, and barrel racing. Take to the trails at the Vermont Icelandic Horse Farm in Fayston, Lajoie Farm in Jeffersonville, Chipman Stables in Danby, or Breakaway Farm in Grand Isle. Enjoy watching a polo match at the Sugarbush Polo Club in Waitsfield or Amdez Polo Club in Shelburne.
Lake Morey Skating Trail
Stretching over four miles in length, the free, public Lake Morey Skating Trail in Fairlee is the longest continuous ice path in the U.S. Skaters can follow the perimeter of the 500-acre lake or play hockey on one of a dozen rinks. Skates are available to rent at Lake Morey Resort and there are lakeside benches for lacing up. Afterwards, head inside for a hot chocolate.
Skydiving
See Vermont from 12,000 feet above — and then feel the thrill of falling toward it. At Vermont Skydiving Adventures in Addison, take in views of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains; at Skydive Vermont in Highgate, catch a glimpse of the Montreal skyline. Both companies are members of the United States Parachute Association, which promotes safety through training, licensing, and instructor qualification programs.
Boat Tours
Explore Vermont from the water. Whistling Man Schooner takes passengers out on Lake Champlain on one of two wooden-rigged sloops. Sail Vermont accommodates up to 18 guests on a 43-foot former racing boat. Book a dinner, sunset, or harvest moon cruise on the 140-foot Spirit of Ethan Allen, complete with a bar, restaurant, and space for 363 guests. In Newport, enjoy dinner and live music on the Northern Star, which cruises Lake Memphremagog, entering Canada past secluded islands and lakefront Quebec towns.
Diving on Wrecks
There are an estimated 300 shipwrecks at the bottom of Lake Champlain, sometimes called “The Sixth Great Lake.” Ten are part of the state-owned Underwater Preserves and are open to certified divers. In warmer months, Waterfront Diving Center in Burlington works with an independent charter captain to transport SCUBA divers to explore the wrecks. The center also rents diving equipment, guides dives, and provides dive training.
Snowcat Mountain Tours
There’s more than one way up and down the mountain at Vermont ski resorts. Some offer trips in heated grooming snowcats for scenic views or mountaintop dining. Ride to Allyn’s Lodge at Sugarbush Resort for a candlelit culinary experience, and then take the snowcat down again — or ski down in the moonlight. Sugarbush also offers Sunrise First Tracks and après groomer experiences. At Smugglers’ Notch, hitch a snowcat ride across the upper mountain to take in stunning views and stories about natural history. Stratton Mountain Resort offers a snowcat excursion up to the mid-mountain lodge for a six-course elevated dining adventure.
Inn to Inn Walking Tours
Walking Vermont’s back roads is a scenic way to experience the state’s peace, beauty, and nature at your own pace. Walk 10 miles a day through pastoral settings with a Vermont Inn to Inn Walking Tour, which sets up each night’s accommodation and transports your luggage as you visit hilly, rural southern Vermont. Tours available from mid-May through the end of October.
Food
Specialty Culinary Classes
Learn how to craft a croissant or perfect a baguette at King Arthur Baking Company, which offers an array of classes in Norwich year-round. At Sugar Glider Kitchen in Hartford, learn to make macarons, apple strudel, and other treats. Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock offers workshops on creating the perfect charcuterie board, followed by sociable downtime for sampling your creations.
Adventure Dinner
Adventure Dinner creates themed family-style dining experiences and community events using local farm ingredients, hosted at its event space, the Clubhouse, in Colchester. The company also hosts four-course signature dinners at farms around Vermont, with a focus on using local ingredients and products. Other experiences include hiking or snowshoeing to dinners outdoors.
Farm Visit at Hill Farm
Dine in the lofted barn with a wood-fired oven or gather at the Chef’s Counter to watch food being prepared with ingredients sourced on-site or locally. Meet alpacas, enjoy fly-fishing on the Battenkill River, and walk riverside trails on a 70-acre property founded in 1790. The main inn has been welcoming guests for 150 years.
Mushroom Foragers
A pair of longtime mushroom hunters will help you find and harvest edible fungi, with workshops that emphasize ethics, ecology, safety, and sustainability. Foraging outings explore Shelburne Farms, Audubon Vermont, and other sites rich in these wild delicacies.
Maple Sugarhouses
Vermont has more than 3,000 sugarhouses, and many of them open their doors during Maple Open House Weekend in the spring. Learn about maple sugaring history, sap collection, and the crafting of maple sugar products. Many offer tours and tastings and will ship your purchases home for you. Find a sugarhouse at Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association.
The Chocolatorium
Make a stop at the the Village Peddler and Chocolatorium in Arlington to learn about the origins and culture of chocolate. Through an exhibit, demonstrations, and tastings, visitors can explore where chocolate comes from and how it is made. A tour includes a movie about the history of chocolate and the chance to make your own chocolate bar.
Cabot Creamery Retail Stores
Cabot Creamery has taken home “World’s Best Cheddar” nods for years running. Sample their products at the Cabot Creamery Store in Waterbury or in a 1860 yellow barn in Hardwick. Both locations also showcase other artisanal products and souvenirs.
Champlain Valley Dinner Train
Vermont’s stunning landscapes spread out before you like a tapestry as the 1930s train chugs through bucolic mountain and lakeside views. Enjoy a three-course dinner cooked onboard on this two-
and-a-half-hour train trip from Burlington to Vergennes and back.
Lincoln Peak Vineyard Volunteer Grape-Picking
This family-owned vineyard in New Haven invites the public to pick grapes at harvest time, from the end of August to mid-October. Picking starts at 8 a.m. Pruners and gloves are provided, and the community of harvesters celebrates their labor with lunch and wine around midday.
Tiny Bread Box
This self-serve farmstand for baked goods is the work of Argentina-raised Natalia Meijome, who leavens her small-batch treats and bread with a wild sourdough yeast culture. The automated Vernon farmstand, located near the trailhead to J. Maynard Miller Municipal Forest, doesn’t take cash, only cards.
Cheesemaking
Making your own cheese can be a long process of trial and error. Between the Trees Farm shares its expertise with a variety of cheesemaking classes, from a four-hour class on hard cheese to a 30-minute lesson in making fresh mozzarella from a gallon of farm fresh raw milk.
Bliss Farm Chef-Made Dinners
A pair of chefs find inspiration in the gardens of their family farm. Menus can include homemade pasta, smoked chicken, salads, and more, served at shared tables in the barn with up to 30 guests. Kids are welcome.
Culture
Circus Smirkus
Catch a performance of the only tented traveling youth big top circus tour in the U.S. This Greensboro-based traveling youth circus has been on the road since 1987 and features up to 80 performers ages 12-18 under traditional European big top tents. Acts feature a new storyline each year and include aerials, acrobatics, juggling, clowning, and original live music.
Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium
With exhibits covering natural science, history, and the planets, including the state’s only public planetarium, Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium in St. Johnsbury invites exploration. View 19th-century mosaics made of moths and beetles, Victorian-era taxidermy, and the seasonal butterfly house. Travel through time with a planetarium show or visit hands-on meteorology and astronomy exhibits in the science annex.
Haskell Free Library & Opera House
The Haskells, local benefactors, built this late Victorian-style library and opera house directly on the boundary line between Vermont and Quebec in order to create a shared center for learning and enrichment. The international border runs through the building; you can stand with a foot on either side. Take a tour, or find yourself seated in either Canada or the U.S. as you enjoy musical events, theater, dance, movies, or other programs in the 400-seat theater.
State House Tours
Vermont’s gold-domed marble state house is the smallest in the
U.S. and is a piece of living history, right down to local fossils in its flooring. The building bustles with policymakers, lobbyists, and journalists from January through May. Year-round, the imposing Montpelier building is open for self-guided explorations or
docent-led tours.
Hope Cemetery
The 19th-century Hope Cemetery in Barre is a 65-acre memorial to the workers of the region’s granite industry, once home to one of the world’s largest granite quarries. Artisans traveled from around the globe to work the high-quality grey stone, and many carved their own creative headstones. Among the cemetery’s 10,000 monuments are a race car, a soccer ball, figures, busts, obelisks, and angels.
Hall Art Foundation
View postwar and contemporary artworks on display at a former 19th-century dairy farm in Reading. The exhibits come from the collections of Andrew and Christine Hall, who have also renovated a castle in northern Germany and a shed at Mass MoCA to hold their collection of about 5,000 pieces. Open May through November for self-guided or docent-led tours, the 400-acre campus has a reception center and café.
Old Stone House Museum and Historic Village
This complex of hand-built stone structures in Brownington is a testament to Alexander Twilight, a Black Vermonter born in Corinth in 1795. Twilight became the first Black man to earn a college degree in the U.S. when he graduated from Middlebury College; he went on to work as an educator. Twilight constructed his own home and other buildings on the site, which now holds exhibits and educational programs. Hike the educational trail or book a guided visit.
Robert Frost Interpretive Trail
Let the Robert Frost poetry along this Ripton trail guide you through the woods where Frost himself walked when he was spending summers at the nearby Homer Noble Farm. Frost, perhaps best known for “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” often evoked the nature of rural New England as a U.S. Poet Laureate, and he won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work. The first section of this mostly flat 1.2-mile walk is wheelchair-accessible.
Rokeby Museum
Four generations of the Robinson family — Quakers, authors, farmers, and abolitionists — occupied this Ferrisburgh home from 1793 to 1961. Now it’s a National Historic Landmark and one of the best-documented Underground Railroad sites in the nation. Visit to experience educational programs that reflect on slavery, the Underground Railroad, and the modern struggle for social justice and equity. A changing roster of exhibits displays the homes, furnishings, and belongings of the Robinson family over the years.
Newbury School of Weaving
Participate in a workshop or drop-in class at this community of traditional weavers and other fiber artists, built on sustainable practices and dedicated to traditional craft, research, and preservation. The Newbury school includes techniques dating to the 19th century and earlier, with an emphasis on rediscovering those that have fallen out of use over the past 150 years.
Whales Tails
Between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, Vermont was home to the Champlain Sea, which harbored marine animals like beluga whales, seals, and Atlantic cod. Since that sea drained, Vermont has been landlocked, but two beloved art installments reflect this legacy: the famous whale tails, sculptures called “Reverence” and “Whale Dance” by artist Jim Sardonis. Granite waving tails, 13 feet tall, beckon from the side of Interstate 89 in South Burlington and from a field in Randolph, where there’s a parking area for those who want to walk closer to the 16-foot bronze tails.
The Stone Trust at Scott Farm Orchard
There’s an art to building the drystone walls that symbolize New England’s agricultural past. The Stone Trust’s stonework education and training center in Dummerston features an array of examples, including the largest display of crafted stone walls in North America. The campus, including an indoor facility in an 1862 cow barn, offers six sites the public can visit, including short hikes to several art installations, historic sites, and a granite quarry. Nearby is Moon Bridge, an otherworldly public work in Putney that reimagines a 100-year-old granite bridge abutment as a huge, mesmerizing stone circle.
The Chazy Fossil Reef
National Natural Landmark Isle La Motte is home to the Goodsell Ridge Fossil Preserve and to Fisk Quarry Preserve, both places where visitors can walk the trails and see 480-million-year-old fossils that are part of the Chazy Fossil Reef, one of the oldest fossil reefs in the world.
The Museum of Everyday Life
Celebrate the ordinary at the Museum of Everyday Life, an unassuming self-service installment in Glover. In this unstaffed country barn (visitors are asked to turn off the lights when they leave) see an exhibit about dust, including specks of volcanic ash from the Mount St. Helens eruption and a bit of cosmic powder sent by NASA. Here, learn about the evolution of the toothbrush and take in a touching display of lists found and made, from grocery to gratitude.
Wellness
HOT SAUNAS AND COLD PLUNGES
Experience an endorphin rush by transitioning from a sauna to a cold plunge in the rushing waters of Madbush Falls at Savu in the Mad River Valley, or try Savu’s other sauna locations on the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington or at Smugglers’ Notch.
The sauna at the Featherbed Inn and Nordic Spa in Waitsfield is modeled after a sugar shack, with a cedar cold plunge and swimming pool available, and in East Hardwick, Sweet Cedars Nordic Spa offers an outdoor experience with a cedar sauna and cold plunge. At Renu Lounge and Day Spa in Manchester, an infrared sauna and red light therapy join a cold plunge and soothing recovery area for rejuvenation and restoration.
Vermont Salt Cave Spa and Halotherapy Center
Step into this man-made and climate-controlled salt cave composed of 20,000 pounds of Polish rock salt. The minerals and negative ions in the air create a relaxing holistic wellness experience.
Owners Nafis and Sarita also offer electromagnetic bio-field readings, hand and foot detox sessions, infrared heat therapy, massage, and Reiki. The attached shop stocks herbs, teas, tinctures, elixirs, and crystals.
Flying Goat Yoga
Inner peace is easy to find on a yoga mat shared with a goat. At Fucci Farms in Castleton, experience guided yoga sessions with lovable goats frolicking around and aerial yoga, where fluid movements feel weightless. Flying Goat Yoga also offers a harvest sound bath, a sound and fire event that takes place under the moon and stars, and private yoga therapy.
Alpaca Walk Experience
In scenic Andover, near Okemo, Stratton, Bromley, and Manchester, walk an alpaca on a leash while learning their communication and bonding behaviors. These soft, gentle creatures are closely related to camels and llamas and make for calm, quirky, and cute companions. Visitors can also hand-feed their new long-legged friends at the farm. An on-site store offers alpaca wool products.
Karmê Chöling Meditation Retreat Center
This Buddhist Meditation Retreat Center in Barnet offers meditation workshops and guided programs focused on personal exploration, self-care, and mindful living. Located on 500 acres among lush forests and clear streams, Karmê Chöling also has a Japanese-style rock garden, koi pond, organic garden, and six wooded hiking trails.
Thoughtfully Curated Itineraries
Inspired by how much there is to do? As you plan your Vermont vacation, itineraries can help you make the most of your experience. Discover long weekend itineraries, regional trip planning guides, and more.
Read More about Thoughtfully Curated Itineraries
DOG DAYS
Vermont is a great place to be a dog. Late artist Steven Huneck’s 150-acre Dog Mountain in St. Johnsbury is a free-range haven for canines and their people. The mountaintop property includes a dog chapel where guests can leave an homage to departed pets.
Visitors who want to meet a dozen happy, silky-haired golden retrievers can sign up for the Golden Retriever Experience on the 270-acre Worple Farm in Jeffersonville. Guests first meet the retrievers when the dogs are in the back of a truck; when the tailgate comes down, the dogs burst forth to say hello, frolic, and chase balls. In warm weather, visitors play outside with the dogs; in winter, there’s a barn with a woodstove and hot chocolate where humans can relax while the goldens work the room. Visits include a photo session.
To meet some working dogs, head to Eden Ethical Dog Sledding Experience, where owner Jim Blair educates guests about the responsibilities and rights of sled dog owners as he takes them on a fast-moving dogsled ride through the woods of northern Vermont. Umiak Outdoor Outfitters offers dogsledding trips in Stowe and October Siberians in Waterbury runs trips in Little River State Park.