Pedaling Vermont: tortuous hills and glorious vistas

Vermont's roads reward cyclists with long views and stops such as the Barnard Country Store. (PHOTOS BY MARTY BASCH/FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

WEST HALIFAX, Vt. - The simple lesson I learned after the first 15 miles of a top-to-bottom mountain-bike journey of the Green Mountain State can be summed up by a T-shirt I saw: Vermont ain't flat.

One's appreciation of the dramatic beauty of the state deepens with the sweat and pain that comes from inching up yet another rise in your bike's lowest gear.

My partner, Jan Duprey, and I started our journey last spring north of Newport on a rail trail along Lake Memphremagog's sleepy shores and ended on a rolling country road in West Halifax by the Massachusetts border.

Why? Someone once told me that half of Vermont's roads are dirt, and we wanted to try some out. With 15,682 miles of roads, the Vermont Agency of Transportation confirmed that 8,660 miles are dirt and 7,022 are paved. Some e-mail inquiries led to a spring dinner in the Northeast Kingdom at Dave and Lindy Sargent's farmhouse. The couple - he's a retired state engineer and she's a school librarian - detailed the 215-mile, three-day route they cycled a few years ago, which included 102 unpaved miles. The Sargents' two daughters had pedaled the state top to bottom twice on Route 100 and Route 5, but their parents preferred the rural roads. We followed their suggestions.

In Vermont's hill country we were tortured by steep false summits. We passed yards with whimsical decor, blighted fixer-uppers, stone walls, cemeteries, and ponds. Our rewards were stellar vistas of rolling patchworks of farm, field, fences, and forest. Cooling breezes blew through shaded stretches along cascading streams.

There were glorious downhill segments where we matched speeds reached by waving pick-up drivers and moms making the 3 o'clock school caravan. Our hands hurt from brake-pumping, and our nerves frayed at rutted roads.

We packed light, choosing to stay in hotels and a friend's house. I carried my gear in a small backpack while Jan had a saddlebag affixed to her bike's rear rack.

The flattest miles we traveled were the first few along the Beebe Spur Rail Trail, shy of the Quebec line. With the road rimmed by mountains, the pedaling along the waterway was a treat before tackling the next day's hills.

It didn't take long for sights to become familiar: horses, cows, sheep, deer, farm stands, and covered bridges. We also encountered oddities like the floating bridge in Brookfield, a moose who pranced away from us, and in Proctorville Gulf, the only bear-crossing sign I've ever seen in New England.

Small general stores sold everything from soda to brie, and quickly became back road oases for relaxation in towns from Craftsbury to South Newfane. While cashiers greeted customers by name, we rested on chairs or benches outside and checked our map. After a 60-plus-mile first day we arrived at the hilly state capital, Montpelier, along the Winooski River.

The beauty of this kind of travel is that your bike is also a calling card. People are generally curious about where you are going and where you have been. When we thought we were at a dead end in the tiny town of East Bethel, we stumbled upon a man working in his yard. A short hello for directions led to a 45-minute visit. We learned that his home had been a 1910 store, that he pumped his own water, had solar cells for electricity, and that his uncle was from our town.

The back roads we traveled were sometimes part of other trail systems: the cross-country-ski Catamount Trail, a snowmobile corridor, even an equestrian network. Resting from a tortuous hill outside South Woodstock, we met two curious equestrians. Seeing our route, they suggested an alternative that would take us through some picturesque country west of South Reading called "the Alps." (We stuck to our route.)

That included whizzing by the vast concrete Townshend Lake dam and crossing the 276-foot Scott Covered Bridge built in 1870 over the West River. On the other side, we were rewarded with the rolling dirt State Forest Road and later connected with River Road, flat terrain well-earned after the gnarly hills.

The hills didn't end, but Vermont did, on a stretch of Route 112 near Colrain, Mass. Over four days, we logged 205.95 miles. Of those 94.35 were dirt, and little was flat.

Marty Basch can be reached at marty@martybasch.com.